maya's first road trip

Tomorrow morning, I will leave town with my parents (something I've done countless times before)....and my daughter (something I've never done before). This will be Maya's very first long trip.
She's very excited about it.

We're transporting a piano to 'casacommunitas' (my brother's house in Canton, Ohio).

It is the piano that first taught me to make and love music. My brothers and I grew up listening to our mother's unmistakeable style of arranging hymns on this piano. Falling asleep to her 'sweeping glissandos.' Soon the piano will be at Andy's house for his family to enjoy it's music as he did.... (an excerpt from his mother's day post a few years ago)...

"Lying in bed with the lights out and down the long hallway of the ranch house echo the gentle fingers of my mother playing and playing and playing the piano. Sometimes she would be practicing a particularly troublesome phrase, more often --just playing. Laying there hovering just above sleep I would feel profoundly that the music was a kind of visceral fabric that bound my brothers and sister and father together throughout the otherwise quiet house in the rhythms, the melodies, the countermelodies and always, the sweeping glissandos.

My mom drags her finger up the keyboard, but then slows each of the last notes to one by one keys at the top of the scale and just before the next musical phrase starts there is the slightest of pauses, too brief to fit all of these words into, but long enough that your soul starts to yearn expectantly toward the resolution of the chord, the forward motion of the music, the next great possibility."

I can't wait to hug my Jaelyn and Addison and see them love their new cousin, Maya.

Ryan is coming too, but he can't leave until Thursday after work. We are going to my beautiful friend Al's wedding. (An early wedding rehearsal being the reason that Maya and I are tagging along with my parents on wednesday.) I can't wait to dance to the music of the jazz trio at the reception...

and to be with all of them again...

I miss my friends!