Today our exercise was cleaning the house, because we were having visitors. It was a beautiful sunny day, and outside it felt warm. The top temperature was about 10C, positively balmy! Amazing what we consider toasty now, we South Africans who come from such a warm country. I suppose having to endure way below freezing temperatures for so many months has something to do with it! I carefully cleared away the little patches of snow and frozen leaf-mould from the bed where my crocuses usually peep up, but there is no sign of their delicate colours yet.
We had the two strong young men to help us move things, and by 3 o'clock the ground floor looked wonderful and sparkling! Even the staircase was spotless, nothing sitting waiting patiently on the steps for days to be taken up to its rightful place in a bookshelf, or cupboard, or the bathroom, or just to find a home somewhere. Which is more than can be said for the middle floor, especially Matthew's room, which was the repository for everything untidy downstairs. As he is away in Senegal, he won't mind. We got quite carried away, re-organised things and scrubbed and polished, setting out flowers on beautiful table-cloths, fixing pictures which had fallen down in their frames, putting away all the blankets strewn over the couches to nest in during this long cold winter.
I hate cleaning with a passion, next to cooking, actually before cooking, it is my least favourite thing. It is not quite so bad now because I can listen to a book, but it is the most thankless job, as you clean and clean and next minute everything is dirty and untidy again, because you have to live, and there are (usually) many people who live with you in your house! And everywhere there is this shedding and dissolving and spilling and dropping and everything has to be swept and mopped and polished with a relentless monotony.
So the reason for all the cleaning was that in the late afternoon a piano soirée was held at our house. All my piano teacher's adult students came to have food and wine and play a piece they love. Most of us had never met before and so we sat around in a kind of circle in the Lily Lounge and introduced ourselves one by one, each telling an abbreviated version of our journey to the piano. Many had played as children and then given up, and upon retirement, or some inspiration, had been moved to take up lessons again. Some spoke of dragon-like teachers, and a few had had difficult experiences playing at recitals. Everyone spoke of stress, of feeling nervous.
It is a huge thing, to play in front of people. Piano-playing is something I do every day, practicing on my very beautiful piano that I love, my most prized possession, in fact. But it is a solitary struggle and delight, shared only by Tim who, if he is at home, has to listen to pieces filled with mistakes, and troublesome little phrases played over and over again, and boring scales, and stilted sight-reading. And only every now and then, something of beauty.
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| My beautiful Kawai |
So it takes a lot of nerve to go and sit there and try to produce a perfect piece, with expression, timing and grace. None of us managed that. But we each managed to play something, with little patches of sweetness and light. When we made a complete mess, we just started again. There was a positive hum of support in that room, and every performer received a grand round of applause.
Hard experiences stay with you forever. Mostly you keep them somewhere safely locked up, but sometimes a trigger will cause an awful rushing of memory and you are back there, right in the throes. When I was about 14 or 15, I had proudly learned Fur Elise, which I knew so well that I could just about have played it in my sleep. My music teacher said that I was good enough to play at assembly, which was supposedly this huge honour, to play as all the girls filed silently out at the end of assembly. I had never done it before.
I was wracked with nerves from the moment I woke up in the morning, and all through assembly I dreaded the thought of sitting high up on that stage and playing as everyone filed past me. And then suddenly assembly was over and up I went to sit at the grand piano. I got through about half the piece, and then got stuck, so went back to a part I could remember, and, arriving at the place where I had foundered, halted again. I then decided to start all over again from the beginning, and of course, arriving at the dreaded spot, my mind hiccoughed again, losing itself in a frenzy of worry, where I would never find that lost phrasing again. Miss Thompson, the headmistress, who every time she looked at me saw TROUBLE, came marching over in her very tall intimidating stick-insect way, and ordered me off the stage in front of the half of the school still left in the hall, announcing in a loud voice how disgraceful it was that I hadn't practiced and had dared to play in this hallowed position. It was extremely humiliating and quite soon after that episode I gave up the piano entirely.
So today I felt a similar horror at the thought of trying and failing. This morning I played my piece, Chopin's Nocturne in C Sharp Minor, and got stuck, even though I know it so well that even in my dreams I can play it, and eventually I just gave up trying and went to do something else, which is the sensible thing to do, because I am a much older wiser woman now. A while later I went back and played it with relatively few mistakes, which is the best I can do. And even though I am that older wiser woman, my hands shook and I made one very glaring error, and had to go back to a place I could remember, but I finished the piece with the beautiful aplomb of the last few bars, and bowed to my audience and felt very satisfied, and thought "Up yours, Miss Thompson!" (Oh well, maybe one day I will be old and wise!)
It is very late as I write this, and bright with moonlight outside, from a huge almost full moon, the Maple Syrup Moon, according to Native Americans, as attested to by some moon website, but I think, well, which Native Americans? All of them, even those who lived very far away from Maple trees? It seems so unlikely.
But I will go now to bed, and lie down next to my already sleeping husband. I will see the brightness through our soft kikoi curtains, and think of my sister, because that is what we do, we look at the same moon, on different sides of the earth, and remember our affinity.
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