These photos and your thoughts echo inside me. I remember the piano lessons -this is up, this is down, let’s go up and down… and mostly the making of chocolate chip cookies in Aunt Suzy’s kitchen. Music pulls at all of us. Sitting next to our Dear Old Dad in church and hearing him sing the hymns brings me strength still and I can feel the music in my bones. I’m so glad you saved that piano.
It is sitting here even now in my family room against a wall that is too short to hide its open back. It’s a Mendelssohn upright piano made in Derby, Connecticut, sometime around 1905. You can still find something about it on the Internet. The serial number is something like 102. It’s old, the soundboard is cracked, it’s scratched and beaten, but for something that has celebrated its centennial, it sits up straight. And I love it for the memories it brings back and the people I most associate with it. I had it tuned several years ago for a choir retreat at my house. The tuner said the best he could do was tune it to itself because of the crack in the soundboard, but that was good enough. The fact that he was willing to tune it told me he appreciated it for the music it could still make.
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Sally Gerard 