Puzzle pieces of past fall into place when playing a baby grand

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This is a story about a piano, and a middle-aged woman, and the thrill of rediscovering an old love.The story is mine, but it could just as well be yours -- because we all have things stored inside us that we've half forgotten, and all it takes is a whiff of a particular perfume, a snatch of a song, a scrap of paper with familiar handwriting on it ... and we're there again. In the thrall of whatever "it" was that used to be such a big part of our world.For me, "it" is playing the piano. I started when I was young. Took lessons all the way from second grade into high school. In the beginning, I played because my parents made me. Later, I grew to like it. I think. And I got pretty good. Right near the end, I was playing classical stuff like Bach and Beethoven.Then I quit. I don't even remember why. Life gets complex when you're 16. Priorities are shuffled like cards.After that, I rarely touched a piano. Until this month.Now the baby grand that sat in my mother's living room for 40 years is in my living room. It took four guys to move it into place while I watched, cringing, scared half to death they'd drop it.It's beautiful. Elaborately carved legs. A sinuous "S" curve of wood. Mother found it in pieces, on the floor of a piano warehouse, about to be painted white. She rescued it -- for a song."It's always been yours," she tells me. "We got it for you. You're the only one in the family who plays it. It's time for you to have it."The piano is a little long in the tooth now. It's out of tune. Some of the keys stick. The hammers need to be re-felted. Old memories have to be dusted off when you take them out.I sit down on the bench, open a piece of sheet music and -- surprise! -- my hands float automatically to their places on the keyboard. Treble clef. Bass. Andante. Allegro. The words of a long-forgotten language come back to me, one by one.I can't play very well. But I'm so happy, sitting here, my fingers finding their way over the keys again. It feels like the puzzle pieces of my past are falling back into place.My rendering of "Greensleeves" is tentative. Halting. I miss the C-sharp. Next, one of Chopin's "Nocturnes." Not much better. But it's music.Most of my old piano books are beyond me now. I'll have to start over again, with the John Thompson Modern Course for the Piano -- a red book in which I'd printed my name and the year, 1965. I was 8. My piano teacher glued a silver star on each song I learned; a gold star if I memorized it.Every May, we had a recital at her house. The parents assembled in the parlor and we students sat in the side yard, waiting nervously for the teacher to call us inside for our turn to play. Don't let the screen door bang, she'd say.It's all coming back to me now.(Jeanne Malmgren is the lifestyle editor of the Anderson Independent-Mail.)