The old piano sat in the front room of Pop and Mom Johnson’s home. The old piano with the high top covered with a bright orange, velvet scarf. On the Loxley homestead, the piano sat in the living room (or maybe sitting room back then). It was an old player piano. We kids plunked and rolled our fingers across the keyboards, but I never heard an adult play either one of those two pianos. Of course, we had a well-played piano at home. It was the way of it back then. With no TV, music filled more homes. Children grew up with piano music wending its way around the house. Thus from these roots comes my story.
I have a basket that was full of music. So full that it hardly closed. For years I moved the music along with me. Some of it was Millie’s music that came to me when my mother did not want it. My mind could not get around tossing sheet music away. Seems criminal. All that past captured from the notes on the page to the artwork on the cover. The lyricist and composers worked to have their music produced, to have their music known. Millie had played the sheet music so much that the tattered pages had to be sewn together to keep them in place. She did not destroy the sheet music. She continued its life.
When Mom passed, I accumulated even more music. Pieces that she had played throughout her lifetime joined those of Millie’s. They were the pieces I grew up playing. Some were from her youth. Some were my sister’s favorites. Some were the songs we sang as a family. All were pieces of history. I added these to my mix of music mayhem. My books of music from movies, musicals, Billy Joel and George Gershwin. Rock and roll and love songs. Children’s songs and songs my Great Uncle Jerry Loxley wrote. Music from my piano lessons still hung on. Maybe a grandchild would play them some day. Maybe I might revisit them. All resided together until sorting day.
Yes, it was time to weed out and pass on what I no longer played. A trip down memory lane. I first looked through Millie’s pieces still not able to part with them. They are no longer songs that anyone remembers. They are remnants of a time long past. I still hold Millie in my heart and want to preserve what her stitches held dear. A range of emotions followed me through this sorting of the past. Old loves, deaths, lonely times, happy times, and even painful memories that were accompanied by songs. The basket carried songs that Mom pounded out on the piano throughout my childhood. The pile to pass on grew as I kept the memories and music that were part of me.
We all have sort of sheet music memories that we store. Memories that we take out and look at on occasion. They hold feelings and the music that accompanies them. As we get older, we see a history unfold, and we pick what is important and carry that on with us. My memories are stitched with love.
