By Peggy Sturdivant

I met Penelope on what was to be her due date but was instead her three-week birthday. I met her because of a piano, but that’s the end of the story, not the beginning.

For me it began by renting a piano for a party that was everything a person raised on too many musicals could have hoped for. Although the garden was strung with lights everyone crowded around the piano for hours, singing as a friend played. That Judy Garland moment ruined me for the next 18 years.

The small classified ad in the Ballard News read: Upright piano in Burien free to anyone willing to move. A week later there was a cut-away Chicago Cable company piano superimposing a right angle over the stair railing. It was the only wall space available.

The piano got a makeover from the magical tuner Hak Bo Lee. Little did I know his impromptu riffs while tuning would be the musical highlight of the piano’s entire stay but I started taking piano lessons, along with Emily. She stuck it out for two years and I made it to three. I wanted to be able to play spirituals. I have mastered just one.

When I was finally persuaded to leave my little house on 61st and merge households with Martin (aka Mr. Maple Leaf) I couldn’t be convinced to leave behind the piano. I still held the dream of another party, or even hearing someone occasionally play. Even the moving company didn’t want to have anything to do with the piano.

Some may recall the account of our combined moving fiasco during the Seattle snowstorm of 2008. It involved fishtailing down eastbound 85th NW, smoke damage, abandoned cars, moving possessions by sled, digging out three yards and four separate households trying to get sorted by the holidays. The day after Christmas there were a few hours of thaw before the streets re-iced. The crew positively ran items out of my house before negotiating them up the 22 steps of our new home just half a mile away. “Not the piano,” the crew leader had stipulated at the beginning of the day. He took my silence for agreement.

So it came down to the piano and the boss John. “I have to be out of the house,” I told him. “Am I going to have to call A-1 Piano and pay them to move it?”

John sighed, “I’ll get the ramp.” They rolled the upright out of my old house and the boss himself began digging a new path from the alley to avoid some stairs.

I had managed to prepare cash tips for the crew but knew I needed to up the amount because of the piano, and the fact it was sleeting hard enough to draw blood. Inside Emily and I ripped into boxes looking for the one that held cash from selling her pottery. We ripped off newspaper wrapping to look for the dish with the money. We saw the piano roll by. We were counting out an additional $10 each. We heard men grunting as they lifted the piano, a very ugly sound. “Better make it $20,” Emily said.

December 26, 2008. There the piano stayed against the wall directly across from the front door, for six-and-a-half years as though it took that long to recover from the move. The upright became a multi-level storage unit, plant on top, car keys on one level, bills and stamps on another, cat toys along the keys. But I knew it was time and when a friend said, “You’re just using the piano as a secretary,” I was at that moment ready; my debt to the movers forgiven at last.

I posted the piano on “Buy Nothing Ballard” and fell for the first response. One week to the day of my decision A-1 had transferred my dream and the upright to another house. Annie Nguyen has a dream that’s even bigger than mine: hers involves three generations. Her mother always wanted her to be able to take lessons, but they couldn’t afford them or an actual piano. Now Annie hopes her daughter Penelope will grow up listening to mother and grandmother learning to play. She wants the piano to help convince her mother to move here from Alabama, linking the first grandchild with the mother who came here as a refugee from Viet Nam.

So it went down my front steps and in the back door at Annie’s house. Now it will be a piano for four hands, perhaps someday for six. My chapter of the piano’s story ends with grandmother Mai in the kitchen, and Penelope, age three weeks, beautifully small in Annie’s arms.