MY MOTHER’S PIANO

With week-by-week installments eked out of her Depression Era salary as a typist-clerk, my mother bought a piano, a Baldwin console, slightly larger than a spinet, in gleaming mahogany wood. Each week she visited the store, stroked the piano’s edges, then urged by the store’s owner, she might play a few notes. Each week she feared her piano would be sold to someone paying full price in spite of the proprietor’s promise to keep this one piano for her alone.

Then after it was at last hers, she had to leave it behind when she followed her husband to California where there were good jobs to be had now that America was fighting in WW2. The piano had to be left behind in storage, awaiting packing fees and transportation fees yet to be earned and a living space large enough to give the instrument room to resonate, to sing, to hum in the evenings or weekend afternoons. All those memories and futures waited back in West Virginia while she made a home in a two and one-half room cottage far away on the West Coast where she waited.

In California she worked and saved and dreamed of piano music till there was money enough to ship it to the small craftsman-style home where there was room enough for her cherished piano. With the instrument came sheet music to which she added more and which I learned to play as the years went on. But long before I had lessons, before I learned to talk, I often fell asleep to the music played with my mother’s light touch on the treasured piano that came from all the way from West Virginia.