When the piano arrived in my home in Soldotna in May 2022, a stillness descended on my heart. Six months had passed since it began its long journey to the north, handled by four different companies, a truck, a warehouse, and a barge across the ocean, but here it finally was, standing invitingly in the corner of my new house. Spring light reflected off its ebony curves, and shadows played beneath the lid among the wires. Even the old bench with its embroidered-rose pad, decades old, was the same.

The instrument was nothing unusual and showed its age. Small cracks appeared in the veneer; scuffs bedecked the legs where movers had bumped doors or loading ramps; several keys were chipped from use. The hinges for the lid were rusty and within, the metal was dingy and unpolished. The pedals were worn down to the base and squeaked with each pressing. But elements of care and love showed; a faithfully kept maintenance log showed regular tunings; the bench screws had been re-drilled and repaired when they last failed; the velvet pad where the lid rested had been refreshed and replaced over time. While nothing lasts forever, this piano had been loved.

Would it still sound the same? Hesitantly, I extended my fingers across the keys, and pressed down with a feather's weight, inching, inching, until the softest sound came out.

And with that sound, time unspooled, as if it were all moments at once.

It was a sunny day in 1997, with the oppressive Tennessee summer clinging to the walls and skin. I was four years old, and my fingers barely reached across five keys, but I knew I wanted to play like my dad. Settling myself on the squeaky bench, I stretched my fingers out as far as they would go, painfully, and just managed to reach a sixth key. My father stood behind me; I could feel his smile, though my eyes were focused on the instrument.

My small hands pressed down on one of the notes, but my ears were offended immediately: the wrong one.

"Here," my father said, leaning forward and placing his wide, knobbed hands on the right one. They were hard, weather-beaten hands with stubby, clumsy-looking fingers, but became elegant dancers when on the white keys. He pressed the right one with one hand and guided my hand with the other. "Try again. I'll play this part..."

Twinkle, twinkle, little star, how I wonder what you are...

It was 2000, and I was frustrated. The piano stood in the same place on the same grey carpet, but I had flung myself away from it and was sitting on the hearth, back against the red bricks of the fireplace. Hot, corrosive frustration seethed through my brain, blocking all wisdom with the overwhelming tide of feeling. The joy of playing had disappeared into the drudgery of learning; staffs, ledger lines, dynamics, and time signatures danced mockingly before my eyes, even when closed.

Leaning my head back, I stared at the piano, self-pity replacing anger. For as long as I could remember, I had heard my father play heart-rending hymns and sonatas from its wires; the music echoed from the second floor down the stairwells and seemed to indwell the very walls of the house. When he played, music became heartbeats, second-nature, instinctive. Every note following the other was meant to be, preordained. At Christmas, he played while my sister and I sang harmonies to carols; on Sundays, he played hymns before we left for church. I yearned for the music to spill out of me the way it did from him.

But when I played, the notes tumbled awkwardly out of time, out of place, with missteps grinding the smooth music into rocky pieces. How could he read so fast? Which pedal was supposed to smooth things out? Why did it sound so bad when I played it, when everyone else seemed to do it right? With a deep breath of determination, I returned to the keyboard and the sheet music that dared me to try again. The bass clef, with its foreign codex, laughed at me as my clumsy left hand tried to translate it.

After the third bar of mistakes, I lost myself into a red cloud of self-hatred. I remember dropping my head and slamming my hands against the smooth black enamel of the piano over and over and over and over, until my palms screamed in pain.

My father appeared as if from nowhere and swooped me away-perhaps to protect the instrument as much as me-and cradled me, brushing my hair back from my face. "Maybe we need to take a break," he said softly, his hands holding me steady as my anger dissolved into tears. "Just for a little while. This is supposed to be fun."

Blink.

It was 2004, and the piano stood in a new place: a shady corner of a bright living room in our new home in Arizona. A woodstove burned ten feet away and I stood staring at the piano like a longtime rival, its friendly black enamel winking at me. The house was quiet; everyone else was going about their day. The piano and I had had a cordial relationship for the previous four years, mutually agreeing not to talk about the bass-clef incident. I would keep my palm-pounding to myself and not attempt anything remotely ambitious. The piano would agree to treat me kindly and the notes would sound fine, although perhaps juvenile.

But that would change. A new piece of music awaited me on the rack-a piece I knew, admired, and desperately wanted to learn to play. That motivation overpowered my embarrassment, and I slipped onto the bench with trepidation. Slowly, slowly, slowly, I knew; tackling both staffs at once by sight reading was a surefire way to wind up in a blind rage. Clumsily, I plunked out the treble clef, working my way through the bars and chords that were supposed to flow like a waterfall. After three pages, I returned to the beginning, began the bass clef lines with a gulp.

Mistake after mistake, one flare of temper after another, I steadily picked my way through the bass clef to the end. With my hand hovering over the final note, I hesitated. Was I ready to put them together? Would that monster of anger rise again to overthrow me when I failed? Would I again be bruising my body against the wall of my own perfectionism?

The keyboard lid, polished to a shine, reflected my furrowed face back at me. There were far too many lines for such a small thing-after all, what did it matter if the notes didn't come out right? Who would hear? The piano and I were partners in this. It could make no sound at all without me, and how could a creature with ten fingers be blamed for playing one key wrong among eighty-eight?

And what if I got it right-to what heights would the joy of soaring on a song take me?

To keep the meter, I repeated the lyrics in my head: Love that will not let me go...

It came out right-slowly, but right. As I played, I heard the other instruments that could have accompanied me emerge in my head, filling the empty space, and I was not in the corner of a small house in ranchland. I was in a concert hall, surrounded by other musicians, all embarking on the same journey at once, all carrying one another. The piano was not alone, nor was it a barrier-it was a conduit for me to join a world of music that was otherwise inaudible and invisible.

At the last phrase, I looked up and saw my father leaning against the doorframe, a warm smile spreading across his face.

Blink.

It was March 2009, and my father was dead.

Three days before, he was sitting here, well and laughing, and now he was gone. The house was empty, a shell of what it used to contain. The four of us left were ghostly, barely eating, barely sleeping, barely conversing. Mourners visited us, and cars filled the driveway, but I barely heard what they said. Their familiar faces were fuzzy, without detail, and they moved around me as if I had nothing to do with their presence. Relatives and close friends were sleeping on the couches, filling every inch of the house with people. Much of each day was a blur of function atop grief, like a bandage atop a missing limb.

Though I knew there were other places I could be-places which would perhaps hurt less, take less, and be softer-I spent much of those days in the corner, on the piano bench, surrounded by staffs and ledger lines and dynamics.

The book I held in my lap was the enormous black Methodist hymnal, the binding weak from use, pages dog-eared. Though there were more than a thousand songs, Dad always flipped to six or seven favorites, and I could almost feel his hands when I turned to those hymns. I could hear his improvised introductions and transitions, hear his chuckle when he made a mistake, and hear his bass harmony beneath my sister's melody.

The music pulled at me. Play, play. Let us go to that place together, the piano almost begged, its silence echoing around me.

But I could not bring myself to walk through the halls of those hymns. As euphoric as floating on a melody to the invisible world could be, it could be equally painful now. With age comes experience, but with experience comes grief and loss.

All I could do was replace the hymnal on the shelf, occasionally experimenting with new songs, avoiding thinking of the man who filled every corner of this space where I found my comfort.

Blink.

It is December 2021. The piano moved again, this time to a new house in a new neighborhood, with new sunlight pouring through the windows from a new angle, with new voices around it. I was new, too-Alaska had unexpectedly become my home, with a husband and a new house there with two ridiculous cats. For ten years, I'd been coming home to Arizona for the holidays, and like an extra member of the family, I always made sure to pay homage to the piano.

Over the years, the pain had lessened, and playing out of the black hymnal had become an annual ritual. Its clefs and time signatures had become waypoints into a past that I could no longer reach any other way: the sound of my father's voice had faded, the feeling of his presence a dim shadow that the years had eroded. But when the bars of "All in All" or "Immortal, Invisible, God Only Wise" vibrated through my hands, he returned to me, the closest vestige I could reach any more.

But so much else had changed. All of us were older; my father had never set foot in this house; none of us lived together anymore; even the world seemed older, more worn. And I knew the piano would be coming home with me this time.

"I think it's like four legs on the way," my husband was saying, showing my mother the planned route for the journey. "The movers will pick it up here, truck it north, then it'll stay in a warehouse for a little while, then it gets on a barge..."

Getting a baby grand piano from the Lower 48 to Alaska is quite a travail, unsurprisingly. I even offered to fly down here and drive it up myself to avoid the hassle. But my wonderful husband, with his penchant for complex paperwork problems, had sorted it out-and in five months or so, this bulk of wood, plastic, metal, and memories would arrive in our outpost town on the Kenai Peninsula, hopefully no worse for the wear.

We'd discussed it as a family for years, and I'd gone back and forth on the expense. Really, did it make sense to ship this piano that far north? I could just find another one, and this one could... well, it could...

"Everyone wants it to stay in the family," my mother had said. It was all she needed to say.

Time came back to rest in May 2022, when my hands lifted away from the keys again, and my heart felt like it would unravel.

Some objects take on meaning far beyond their original intentions, linked forever to them inextricably. Every moment, every song I have played, has descended to rest in the body of the piano like faults in a diamond: compressed, perfected, and stored so that as I turn it, I see myself, flaws and all. It is no longer just a piano to me. It is the piano.

In the end, it's just an instrument. But the strike of the keys is the sound of a door opening, of a bridge through time that the heart can cross, even if the body cannot. On the other side is a sunny day, a little girl, and her father's hands atop hers, showing her the way, showing her the way.