Dear K—
While practicing last night, a vivid memory of us came up. I don’t know why this one—maybe it was the yellowed sheet music I found that I thought I’d lost, or maybe it was the smell of my violin case. Whatever it was, I thought of the dairy cows in your yard and the barn behind the cowshed. That old barn whose large doors were open the whole year long, cottony cobwebs stuffed between the beams and thin cracks in the roof bringing in sliced light. Come summertime your brother would round up as many of us musicians as he could think of, as close to a hoe-down as one could have in rural Connecticut.
We’d start off as the usual mash of sound. Tuning, scale runs, snippets of well-worn pieces from muscle memory. Once the music stands were up and the sheet music in place, we fell into place too, a bit jangly. The beauty of it was that we knew how imperfect we were and we laughed at ourselves. Which was more zealous, our playing or our laughter? We’d play until the stars were out and the crickets were as loud as us.
Did I ever tell you that I kept finding grass and hay everywhere for a week afterwards? Tucked in the seams of my violin case, stuck on the inside of my jacket, clumped at the bottom of my purse. Holograms of these remembrances are faded and skipping but still vibrantly alive. Do you think our notes are still there in that barn? Or have they all been sopped up by the cobwebs? Or have they slipped through the cracks by now?
