Playing Again

Today has been a grey, cool, quiet sort of day. A Clair de Lune sort of day. I found myself picking out the first few pages on the piano upstairs a little earlier. It's coming along.

I'm actually a little surprised that I haven't written more about piano before now. I think it's because piano and music are so big, so all-encompassing for me, that I'm never quite sure where to start. In high school, I very firmly identified myself with music and the piano. I was never a determined-to-be-a-world-famous-performer kind of person, but underneath all my schoolwork, my job, my friends, my family, it was always there: practices, lessons, workshops, competitions, jazz band, church hymns, and quiet moments in an empty auditorium, where I was the only person who could hear the notes filling the darkness.

Life changes, of course. I remember the day I realized I was going to quit lessons--it was the winter of my senior year, when pressures of family circumstances, AP classes, college decisions and far, far too little sleep were at an all-time high. I knew where I needed to focus right then, and I knew piano wasn't it. I think my heart broke.

College came, and though I still played every chance I could, those chances were fewer and far between. Then came marriage, and graduation, and a full-time job, and a baby, and for a few years all I could muster was the occasional Sunday evening when Patrick and I would drive up to the school to find an empty piano; I would play, and he would listen.

Last September, we moved to Georgia to stay with Patrick's grandparents--once again I lived in a house with a piano, and now I wasn't working or going to school. For the past eight months, I've been playing around on the keyboard--bringing back to life old pieces I had mastered. I feel like there has been an empty little hollow in my self that has been waiting patiently for years to be found again, and now it is slowly filling back up.

Not only have I found myself re-learning and reviving, but I've also started learning new pieces (like Debussy's Clair de Lune). I'm actually having to teach myself, picking out arpeggios and figuring out fingering. I'm practicing again, and though my twelve-year-old self would hardly believe it, I'm enjoying it.

It feels good, after several, wonderful, whirlwind years of life, to slow down, let the dust settle, and take the time to discover music once again.