Oct 20, 2014 3 min read

We have finally saved enough money to replace our barn roof. After much price comparing, deal wrangling and a little traveling, my husband was finally satisfied that we could afford both the materials and the labor required to get the job done.

This week we started tearing off the old tin. It was so thin that our previous attempts at patching it were unsuccessful (largely due to the fact that the person patching it made more holes with their shoes simply by walking across it.)

Once the old tin was off of the first side, it was determined that the old purlins needed to be torn off as well. Fresh framing was added and the first sheets of tin were prepped.

And I can only wish that the process was as quick to perform as it is to type about.

Around the middle of the second day, I called a halt to the process. I forgot that I had scheduled some friends to help move my mother’s old upright piano to my house. My husband was none too happy to be pulled off his job to move a piano, but after a meditative chant of, “I love my wife, I love my wife, I love my wife,” he got on board.

The piano is somewhere around 100 years old, and absolutely beautiful. It was my grandmother’s, or my great-grandmother’s, if I have the story correct. My mom never played, but was happy to have it when it was offered to her.

It is dark wood and has doors all over it. One on top opens to allow access to the upper assembly, and one down below works the same for the lower parts. A set of pocket doors in the front open to reveal what looks like a player piano – although no rolls came with it – but I couldn’t even hazard a guess as to whether or not that part is still functional. The keys work and that is the most important part to me.

Of course, it needs a tune-up, and if the handwritten notes inside the top are any indication, it hasn’t had one since the late 1950s. However, I was still able to pick out a decent rendition of “Mary Had a Little Lamb,” which is, by the way, the full extent of my skill with the ivories.

The four men made short work of loading and unloading the piano and placing it in my living room, where I was confident it would fit until it made it into the room. We managed to squeeze it in, though not with the amount of clearance I had previously envisioned. Then, everyone went back to their previous engagements, which for my husband and his friend meant the barn roof.

I dusted the piano and put in a call to a local piano tuner to try to schedule a tune-up and repair consultation. Then, I went outside to see if I could help a bit with my husband’s project. It was the absolute last thing I wanted to do, but after a meditative chant of “I love my husband” I did it anyway.

After all, as humanitarian Eva Burrows once said, “In family life, love is the oil that eases friction, the cement that binds closer together, and the music that brings harmony.”