Trego's Mountain Ear

When we got married, Renata didn’t have a piano to play – and pianos were expensive.  And big.  I was kind of a guitar and harmonica guy – and those are a lot smaller, and less expensive.  So the first keyboard instrument I got for her was a melodica – it’s a wind instrument with keys and hers looks like this. We still have it – but she always liked a piano more.

So when we were in Libby, I saw a piano advertised with a Yaak address.  I took the checkbook, the Isuzu pickup, a lot of bracing, and came home with a Piano – a small piano of less than outstanding name recognition.  It tuned up OK – had a kind of tinny, honkytonk sound, and it went to South Dakota with us.  There we were faced with the fact that our daughter liked the melodica, so we wound up getting one for her – a Honer Soprano:

Later, Renata inherited her mother’s 1963 Steinway – so we learned that electronic keyboards had replaced the bottom-of-the-line pianos (I think I got $100 for the little piano I had hauled down from the Yaak) and we replaced it with the Steinway.

In 2015, I retired and we moved back to Trego – but didn’t have the house yet, so we stored the piano in the apartment that became Sam’s.  It waited until this July, when we got enough manpower to load it in the back of the pickup, shift it into 4 low, and slowly, gently, drive it the last half-mile to get it into the house.  It looks like this:

Now, we only need to find the sheet music from where we stashed it, and it will be producing more than scales.