Have you ever learned a skill, forgot it, then relearned it?
When letting go brings something back.
I was sorting through another box for my ongoing Swedish death cleaning project when I came across a stack of old violin chamber music.
Duets. Quartets. Quintets. Pages with penciled notes and dogears from another life.
I figured it was simple enough. Sell the music and two of my three violins. I’d keep the one my grandfather passed down to me, which he bought from a Sears catalog in the 1900s.
That box carried me back to Lander, Wyoming.
Years ago, when I worked at the newspaper there, I wrote a feature story about Becky, the local Suzuki violin teacher.
One Saturday morning my photographer friend Tom stopped by unexpectedly and told me I needed to see a violin he’d found at a garage sale.
We drove back across town. The violin looked worn but had character. The owner said it had once belonged to local fiddler Quentin Roberts. That mattered to me.
It had history.
Provenance.
A life before mine.
I bought it for something like twenty-five bucks.
After that, I contacted Becky and asked if she took adults. She mostly taught the parents of her younger students and people like me who woke up one day and realized they wanted to learn something difficult before it was too late.
So I learned.
Long story short, I got pretty decent.
Not concert hall decent. But good enough to play in a small local orchestra and enjoy myself.
Becky played viola and a second violinist, Lisa, played for tips at a local bar. The patrons there were more accustomed to Dylan than Mozart.
I started collecting music just because I wanted to try playing it someday.
Then life happened and I moved to Colorado.
I relocated to Boulder imagining there would be amateur groups everywhere. There were plenty of musicians, but even the “beginners” had conservatory backgrounds and college performance experience.
My violin disappeared into its case where it has sat for thirty years.
When the woman stopped over to pick up the sheet music, we talked. I asked her why she wanted it.
Turns out she and her husband were in the exact same predicament I was.
Former players. Rusty musicians. People who once loved playing but drifted away from it over time.
Except they had taken the next step. They had found a few other “hackers” like us to play together for fun.
Then came the best part.
She lives two blocks away.
I had been preparing myself emotionally to part with the music and the violins, thinking Swedish death cleaning meant dismantling old identities.
Instead, the process handed one back to me.
Now I’m thinking about restringing the fiddle.
Maybe the point of Swedish death cleaning is figuring out which possessions are still attached to joy, memory, possibility, and will find new homes when the time is right.
Who would have thought that lightening the load could also put something back into my hands?
The image at the bottom was taken at a fiddling workshop led by one of my high school classmates Bob Mathews.
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