Up

I remember the first day, and how she turned around on the bench to smile back at me before she began.
A little bit nervous, a lot excited;
Her expression a regular of hers: Like she was about to make history.

My middle daughter, Tessa, then just 8 years old, had begged to learn to play the piano,
and so, being that we were tight on money,
I’d found a way to get lessons for her by offering childcare to my piano teacher friend in a trade.

She picked it up rather quickly;
Like piano had been an actual need she had known.
One-on-one time there and back in the car, and me all to herself was just a bonus;
She has always loved my voice behind her,
cheering on the progress she has made.

She had just had her very first recital,
barely past the cute curtsy bow,
when the big fire came blazing through our city decimating everything it touched.
Thousands of homes lost, horrifying images burned in.
We lived for months in the kind of daze only those who have survived a disaster know.

It took many months to process what had happened to our town.
Our entire horizon was different.
We would often get lost in neighborhoods we used to know so well, because there were no longer landmarks we recognized as the same.
Homes and parks and places we loved to eat – It felt like nothing as we knew it had stayed.

Half the piano teacher’s neighborhood was turned to a smoking wasteland, blocked off by police tape, and unable to keep looking at piles of wreckage that used to be her road to home,
she stopped teaching lessons and moved her family for a fresh start out of state.

Piano lessons were over just as soon as they had begun.
I wonder how many things we do for the last time when we don’t even know…

Tessa never said much at all about having her piano lessons taken.
Our money then was too tight to pay anyone else to teach her,
and she never again even brought it up to me,
but when we pass that neighborhood to this day,
I still notice her look out the window down that street.
She just tucked her beginner book away in the garage, and silently processed the way that everything around her had changed.

There is a hollow feeling moment when the music stops,
whether you’re in the middle of a concert hall, or just your average day;
Like you can still sense the space where it used it dance inside your chest,
and unless a new song begins, the hollow never really goes away.

A little over a year ago my mom had been getting rid of an old roll-out piano she had been given. “Nothing fancy. Kind of more for fun,” she shrugged.
Tessa said she would like it, casually.
My mom passed it down and no one really thought of it again.
For a year, in its dusty box, it remained.

Kept tucked away
– something we’d grow to identify with –
waiting to, once again, be unrolled.

One night a couple weeks ago as I sat in my chair after I thought the family had all gone to bed,
I began to hear music from that same keyboard, coming from inside Tessa’s room.

It took me a minute to figure out what it was.
It had been so long since I’d heard her play.
Not wanting to embarrass her by suddenly opening her bedroom door,
I went outside to listen through her open window some.

I stood in the dark of a full moon night, peering towards her room’s amber glow, listening to the sound of my daughter’s dreams in their top form.
This brave warrior has faced destruction head-on so much these last few years,
and fought to protect what she knows.

The music stayed.
She never let go.
Nothing can threaten if you are your own true home.

It was a little rough and choppy, but I knew the melody.
She was playing the Theme song from “Up,”
and even though broken by starting over again a few times,
that tune made me cry for more than the fact that it just always does.

Those notes, though they were timid at first, meant her love for piano had not died.
The fire and then the pandemic have destroyed so many things, but
that song was like a part of herself that she was tying hundreds of balloons to.
She was unbroken.
She would be OK.

I smiled because we have always said she was just like Ellie from that movie:
Wild hair, courageous, with adventure that blazes in her soul.
I have worried so often in these last 4 years over what things will remain in her and what things will go, but inside her lives a thing that cannot be turned to ash and blown into the wind,

Colorful,
Tethered,
In the air it rose.

Later, when she exited from her bedroom that night,
not knowing I’d heard her heart and her song,
I asked her if maybe she’d like to start lessons again.
She swallowed hard, and nodded that, yes, she would.

Four days later and she was back at it again,
still on that little roll-out piano for now.
The lessons are virtual.
“Tessa, can you tilt your screen?”
The way she’s taking lessons has changed, along with so much else these days,
but her music never came from a fancy piano. That’s not all its about, anyway,

My friend Ori has always been so good at reminding me that the hard things our kids face doesn’t mean sure ruin for them.
I can get wrapped up in concern when they go through hard things, and she always pulls me back home.
She reminds me that, just like the things that shaped us, our kids are being shaped, too,
by everything that happens. The good AND the bad.
Sometimes the hard things are what it takes to become.

I pray that my girl will always know that I never stopped watching,
or cheering from the seat behind her;
That I was watching as her balloon house soared.
I hope she knows how proud I am to be the mom of someone who has walked through fires and disasters, and still chose to play her music for the world.

This article was written by a guest blogger. The opinions expressed here are those of the writer and do not reflect the opinions of Bob Lacey, Sheri Lynch or the Bob & Sheri show.

Mom Outnumbered

Hi! My name is Kerri Green; Wife to Justin, and mother to four highly entertaining daughters -Alena, Chloe, Tessa, and Paige. I am an artist, a writer, a daycare provider, a lover of people, a believer that there is humor and beauty in all things, and the author of Mom Outnumbered; a blog about real family life, and my observations of it. My goal is to make people laugh, to be there for them when they cry, and most importantly, to let them know that they are not at all alone in this up and down world. I live with my family in Sebastopol California, and I am opening the window into our life. So welcome! Come in. Sit down. Just please don’t mind the mysterious wet spots.