My Emerson Upright Piano

January 2006

Yesterday, on the 11th day of Christmas, I received one last Christmas gift, something I had specifically asked for. A piano tuner came to our house and tuned my piano. 

He also fixed two small things that were wrong with it -- a key on the far right that didn't make a sound and also the C key, an octave above Middle C, that didn't hold its sound. The damper on the C was broken, so he removed the damper from the highest of notes that have dampers and moved it down to that C. He will try to order a replacement damper from his catalogs of old piano parts. 

 Isaac felt vindicated and outraged when I told him the piano tuner had found the missing ivory key-cover inside the piano. For years, I thought that the kids had lost that piece of ivory, and Isaac remembers that I expressed my suspicion quite a few times.

As all piano tuners do when they work on this piano, he commented that it was in very good condition and had a nice sound for the age of the instrument. It's probably over 100 years old. The most recent patent date inside the piano is 1893. 

My mother bought this piano from a newspaper ad when it became apparent that I was practicing my piano lessons willingly and learning to read music. We had another piano before this one. My mother had tried to refinish it, and it hadn't gone well. When she moved in the new piano, my dad took the old piano to the blowout* and dumped it. I remember it lying on its back with its face to the sky. 

Over the years, this piano went from Nebraska to Missouri to Kansas with my mother and father, and after they passed away, I moved it to Kentucky. The kids and I had a memorable trip! We drove an excessively large U-Haul truck that was nearly empty except for the piano, dragging our car behind for 750 miles.We made the trip without serious incident, and the day that the piano took up residence in my living room, I know that my mother smiled. She bought the piano for me, and at last it was in my home. She would be glad that I got it tuned again at last, and she'd be pleased at how nice it sounds. *

In the Nebraska Sandhills, a region of grassed-over sand dunes, where I grew up, a blowout is a sandy depression or hole caused by wind erosion. Rightly or wrongly, Sandhill ranchers discarded their trash in blowouts. Trash in a blowout was a ranch history of sorts, with an odd assortment of well-weathered objects such as old cast iron cook-stoves, tangles of antique barbed wire, old bottles and cans, and skeletons of dead cattle. And a piano, in this case.