Road repair
The work of staying connected
Well, hello there.
It has been a minute. Almost twelve weeks, as it turns out.
It’s been…weird?
I was excited in July to take a little break from all the keyboards, and it was great to spend some days away from the piano and the laptop. Music called me back almost immediately, as it always does. Practicing new recital programs, playing Great American Songbook hits with my husband on saxophone, climbing on the organ bench Sundays - my ears, eyes, hands, and heart all stretched toward those keys like hikers heading for a new trail, welcoming effort and impatience like old companions who knew as well as I that sunshine and healing air were waiting in abundance along the way.
But the laptop stayed closed. Technically, it was open when it sat on the kitchen table, then on the desk, then on the table outside on the porch. I kept tweaking the atmosphere: teas both hot and iced, music in headphones, music on the speaker, no music at all. Nothing. It started to feel more than a little scary. I’ve struggled to keep up with a writing schedule before, but never found that I couldn’t write.
Coming out the other side of it now, the reasons for this blockage are becoming clear. There’s more to say about those reasons, but that’s another post. After such a long break from Music Minus None, I don’t want to start back focussing on feelings of disconnection.
I’d rather start with a little road repair.
After the terrible Hill Country flooding in July, we had it easy. We were safe along with our home and animals - so many friends were repairing fences, digging out sunken vehicles, slogging through the nightmare of home insurance claims, or at worst mourning the loss of animal and human companions. The relatively small problem we faced was that the long dirt road leading to our house was badly washed out. During the week of rain that began July 3, about 15 inches of water dug two impressive streams down the gradual slope that bends to a curve at the bottom of our hill. Just a few days of pricing road repair convinced us to try fixing the road ourselves.
When the guy from the quarry delivered us thirteen tons of road base, he refused to drive our road in his huge sturdy truck. So every morning for several weeks, from about 7 to 9 o’clock when the heat became unbearable, we would load gravel into our Chevy and take it down the road a few feet at a time, shoveling it back out, spreading it, and tamping it down.
It was slow, exhausting, dirty, painful work. We would drag our 60-plus-year-old selves back to the house, eat breakfast, gulp water, and pass out for a mid-morning recovery nap. My husband nursed his creaky lower back and I put a heating pad on my aching left arm.
Later, in the afternoon or evening, we’d sometimes go into town to get groceries or go dancing, Each time we went, we could see the road getting a little better, with fewer deep trenches to navigate. The next morning, we’d be out in the rising sun, working another patch of our path, painstakingly smoothing one more tiny piece of the damaged land. On the day our hill became normally driveable, I couldn’t remember the last time I felt as proud of something. The road still had a homemade feel, rough and uneven and country, but we had made it ourselves.
Even with my biceps screaming at me, I had no trouble playing the piano on road repair days; practice felt of a piece with shoveling gravel. Musical practice earned my undying loyalty in childhood. At six years of age I could already see that whatever effort I put in paid off, maybe not immediately, but always, always. Sweating in the sun, sitting on the bench, claiming one more foot of ground or one more measure of music every day, recovering with rest and exhaustion, getting up another day to do the same, I could watch the clear path forming and reforming before my eyes. I experienced an intense, deeply emotional reconnection with my body, its ability to work, its resilience, its capacities.
These days I read my music off of a screen, but text on a screen sets off different associations. My iPad is just a different delivery device for my song and opera scores, which I recognize like old friends. But as I type text on my screen, I feel the how near is the widening abyss of slop, grift, and lies available over the same screen. No one can avoid the assault of fake images, fake text, and downright insane reality delivered to us in real time. Unless you just stop looking.
I stopped for a while, intending only to take a break from reading, but writing dried up as well. That was lonely. I missed it. But this summer of shoveling and songs brought me back to the essential nourishment of work, using my own body, mind, and spirit to build the ways in and out of my home and heart.
So now, before the sun gets too hot, here’s a little patch of smooth road. I hope you use it to walk on over to my house. I built it for you, but more than anything I built it for myself. I built it because I am a builder just like you. The work of your strong body is the work of your hands is the work of your mind.
Back to work.
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thanks for reading.
Wonderful to have you back!