In a bout of writer’s block in my first trimester of pregnancy earlier this fall (we’re due April 4 of next year!), I wanted to keep writing. Sticking stuff together had gotten me unstuck.” She goes on, “Feeling strangely refreshed, I returned to my deadline work and finished it. It turned out so pretty that she put it in a frame.
There were “scraps of ornamental paper, a tea canister lacy with rust, baroque buttons, appealing shards of crockery, mate-less earrings too pretty to pitch, a Burmese candy wrapper.” She found herself turning over an old bamboo sushi box and gluing bits of memory to the back of the box.
In manic procrastination and avoidance, she opened a junk drawer full of random items from her travels. It’s art really, the way some things group together on accident in natural time capsules.Īuthor Judith Stone tells of how writer’s block had her pacing in front of a dresser. When I came across Real Simple’s article “Lost and Found” a few weeks ago, I started wishing I’d kept the little collection discovered on the inside of the piano. Inside, tucked between keys or hiding in the cavity behind the damper and sustain, there was treasure, an accidental collection of items: a 1930s postcard swirled with fancy cursive, a tiny green pencil with hardened eraser, old coins and a matchbox car with chipped paint.
We plucked tired strings on the heavy harp. We loosened the yellowed keys and the felted hammers and pulled them out one by one. Hinges creaked and the smell of history rose up, the aroma of old wood soaked in with years of smoke from burned dinners and moisture from flooded cellars. So, we gave in and opened the upright grand to hollow it out and make room for my keyboard. We had hopes for curing its tone-deafness, to tighten the strings to perfect pitch, but one look at the piano and our tuner friend said it was no use.
My husband and his dad drove 20 hours round-trip through swarms of cicadas to bring it home. A piece of history was set to be put out for the garbage if we didn’t come pick it up, this giant music box handmade in the 1920s right here in my state.