The Piano

Mango blouse
Sezane jeans
Sezane heels
Hermine Hold barrettes (c/o) (similar)
Gisel B ring (c/o) (similar)
Urban Outfitters earrings (similar)
Location: Osborne Village – Winnipeg, Manitoba

I took my first piano lesson just before I turned nine, at the beginning of fourth grade. A piano was a constant presence in our house, installed in our childhood playroom and then in the basement. I was far from a musical prodigy. In fact, I proved to be pretty much entirely tone deaf. Despite the fact that I couldn’t properly hear the notes, I played reasonably well – but all the hours (okay, who am I kidding, the requisite fifteen minutes a day) of practising couldn’t hold my attention. My lessons lasted four years until, after a particularly poor piano exam result, I gave up entirely. I just wasn’t interested.

I love music – I just don’t want to play it myself. Which doesn’t explain why I decided quite suddenly last fall that I absolutely needed a piano to fill an empty corner in our apartment. Quite frankly, I’m not sure how I can explain that decision. But weeks passed and the impulse to add a piano to my home decor remained. Like anyone experiencing an unreasonable whim that they feel they must fulfil, I started my search on the internet. After all, paying for a new piano that I can’t really play just because I decided it would look nice in our place didn’t make any kind of sense, financial or otherwise.

There are a surprising number of free pianos in the world, it turns out. But very few of them had all the elements I wanted. The ones that did meet my criteria disappeared from Kijiji and Craigslist before I could even start an email to their owners. For a while, it seemed like my dream of a piano would remain just that – a dream.

And then, I decided to get Ian, who has rather more free time than I do, involved in the search. He didn’t have much more success than I had – at least not initially. But he was able to diligently search for pianos every day, seeking new ads that I would have inevitably missed on busy work days.

The funny thing is, this piano, the one that we wound up with, isn’t really what I envisioned. In my imagination, the piano was owned was smaller, more delicate and, admittedly, less patinaed. But when I saw this behemoth, a  broken player piano from the early 1900s with real (and really chipped) ivory keys that has clearly a long, interesting life, something about it pulled me in. The owners were simply giving it away, which sweetened the deal considerably. We made an offer to move it from their home to ours, and within the week, although not without considerable effort, it was in our living room.

Neither one of us can play the piano. And the fact is, only about half the keys on our piano actually work, anyway. But it fills the empty space next to our kitchen perfectly and, in a strange way, makes the whole place feel just a little bit more like home. Not to mention that despite all the chips, scratches and mystery marks in the wood, it really is a beautiful instrument.