softly worn

There is a piano in my living room that has been with me almost my entire life.

It isn’t rare or particularly valuable. It’s not the kind collectors talk about. But it carries the sound of my childhood.

My parents bought it when my sister and I were young. It sat against the wall in our home, heavy and unmoving, like another member of the household. I took lessons on it as a girl, practicing scales while my mother moved around the house and the television hummed somewhere in the background.

Like most kids, I had a complicated relationship with practice. Some days I loved it. Other days I rushed through pieces just to get outside. But the piano was always there, waiting patiently, lid closed, holding the memory of every note.

There is one spot on it that tells its own story.

On the right-hand side, the wood is worn smooth. When I was little, my piano teacher used to stand beside me there, resting her hand on that corner while I played. Week after week, lesson after lesson, her hand rubbed that same place until the finish softened and faded.

The mark is still there. Years passed. Life moved on. Apartments came and went.

The piano stayed with my parents.

When I bought my brownstone, something shifted. As I began imagining what the rooms would hold, I kept thinking about that piano. Not as an instrument, exactly, but as a piece of continuity. A thread connecting the girl I was to the woman building a home of her own.

So we moved it.

Getting a piano into a New York brownstone is its own kind of production. There were straps, careful maneuvering, and a few tense moments on the stoop. But when it finally settled into the living room, it felt like it had always belonged there.

Now it sits near the window, catching the afternoon light.

Sometimes I play. Not perfectly, not the way my childhood teachers would have preferred, but enough to hear those old melodies again. Other times it simply holds the room.

Homes are full of objects that mark time. A chair from a first apartment. A table you found at a flea market. A painting that reminds you of a trip.

For me, the piano is something deeper. It carries the sound of the house I grew up in and now lives in the house I am still creating.

And on the right-hand corner, there is still a small worn place in the wood, where a teacher once stood patiently beside a little girl learning how to play. In a way, it followed me home.

More soon,

L