I saw marriage, even to a relative stranger, as a way to bring stability to my life. A way to set up a new home in this distant land. A way to grow up. Though we barely knew each other when we married, over time we became close friends and partners. We worked our way through graduate school, eventually moving to Illinois to get our PhDs. Just as we were finishing our degrees, he got a job at Muskingum College in New Concord, Ohio. Neither of us had ever heard of the college, which has since changed its name to Muskingum University, or of New Concord, but we were game for anything. He accepted the job, and we made plans to move and start a new phase of our life.
Before we moved there, I studied the map of southeastern Ohio, looking at the crooked roads indicating hills, the names of villages and towns dotting the landscape: Norwich, Zanesville, Cambridge, Roseville, Crooksville, Barnesville. Southeastern Ohio is just on the edges of Appalachia, in the hilly, unglaciated part of the state. I read about the area’s history, how it had been strip-mined throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, how it was the poorest part of the state, how it was classified as Appalachia by the federal government.
Driving our U-Haul truck from Illinois, I was struck once we got past Columbus by the beauty of the green, rolling hills that seemed to go on forever; the picturesque farm houses and grazing cattle; the winding rural roads; the village with its main street, gas station, grocery store, hardware store, and post office. We bought a little white and blue-shuttered house on the western edge of the village, on a narrow street that climbed steeply up from Route 40, or the Old National Road, which cuts through the village.
In the first couple of years of living in New Concord, we had two children, William and Rose, and I stayed home with them, doing freelance writing in my basement office while my husband taught at the college. The village seemed like a perfect place to raise a family, a perfect place to call our home.
It didn’t take me long to realize, though, that I was an outsider in southeastern Ohio. Down at Shegog’s IGA, the grocery store on Main Street, everyone seemed to know everyone else by name. People in the village spoke with rough, Appalachian accents, and they viewed newcomers with wariness and suspicion. The few people I got to know in those early years were affiliated with the college, but at that time most of the college faculty were middle-aged or older, so I felt just about as isolated from them as I did from the longtime residents of the village. I felt like I didn’t really know this place. And I began to realize that no matter how long I lived there, I’d never be from ’round here.
I stayed home with the kids, keeping to myself, tending to their needs. I tried to make a home in a place that felt like a wilderness outpost. I shopped at Shegog’s; I went to the post office; I bought supplies at the hardware store, pushing first one child and then the other around the village in a dark blue Graco stroller. I tried my best to make a happy, stable home for our family. The kind of home I’d always wanted. The home I’d been wanting ever since we married in the courthouse on that January day so many years before.
Once the kids got a little older, I began teaching journalism at the college, happy to finally have a full-time job, a growing career. But I always had a nagging suspicion that somehow, I didn’t belong to the landscape, to the culture. That I wasn’t a native. Something about the home, and the life we were building, always felt temporary. There’s a wall between those who live in Appalachia and those who move there, and I began to think that perhaps that wall would never be breached.
Occasionally, over the years, I pulled out my violin, rosined up my bow, and played in concerts with the Southeastern Ohio Symphony Orchestra or Messiah performances at a church in Zanesville. But most of the time my trusty old violin stayed in my closet, leaning up against the wall, waiting for those times, few and far between, when I opened its case, rosined up the bow, and took it for a spin.
For the last years of her life, my mom was sick with emphysema, bed bound, hooked up to oxygen, and close to death. One summer night, about nine years after we moved to New Concord, she slipped into a coma and died.
Reeling with grief, confused, and alone, I flew back to the California desert to bury my mom. While arranging the funeral, Ann and I came up with the idea of playing some kind of music for the service. Though we could barely hold ourselves together enough to organize the funeral and write up an obituary, let alone perform, we told ourselves it would be a fitting tribute to her, since she had insisted on all those music lessons, come to all of our school concerts, and encouraged us in our music.
Perhaps we suspected, though, that playing through the funeral would help us cope. Playing, we could focus on notes, and not thoughts. Playing, we’d have rhythm and pitch and phrasing as a grammar for our grief. Grief was startlingly, frighteningly new, but music was a language we’d spent our lifetimes learning.
We had both left our instruments at home, though. We hadn’t even considered bringing them. So, the day before the funeral we sat in the Starbucks on China Lake Boulevard, drinking caramel frappuccinos, watching the traffic, looking at the tumbleweeds piled in the desert lot by the pizza place across the street, considering our options. We talked of calling an old music teacher. We debated looking up friends who had played in orchestra with us. Finally, though, we called a music store and asked about rentals. I explained to the man who answered the phone that we wanted to rent a cello and a violin for a few days so we could practice and then perform at our mom’s funeral.
“We don’t do short-term rentals,” he said.
“Oh,” I said, my voice trailing off. “Okay.”
I heard him pause and breathe on the other end of the line.
“Usually,” he said. “We usually don’t do short-term rentals. But I’ll let you do it for this.”
“Thank you so much,” I said. “You don’t know how much this means to us.”
“That’s fine,” he said. “Just come down to the store.”
So we did, and he pulled out new, shiny instruments for us, set up music stands, and told us we could play as long as we wanted, right there in the middle of the store. Ann and I looked at each other, unable to believe his generosity, offering us both rental instruments and a practice space.
We sat in the middle of the music store and played. We played Bach and Mozart, hymns and popular songs. We played that old high school orchestra standby that we knew so well, Pachelbel’s Canon. We pulled out a wedding songbook from the music store’s shelf, since we couldn’t find a funeral songbook, and we played love songs from its contents. Ann and I played until our fingers hurt, until we couldn’t play anymore. Finally, exhausted and spent, we decided we’d play the Pachelbel, and one of the wedding songs. And at the end, Ann would play “Danny Boy,” because Mom used to like it when she played that song.
On the morning of the funeral, out in the desert cemetery under a tent, we set up our instruments near the end of Mom’s pine coffin, which had purple, blue, and white wildflowers strewn on top. Surrounded by the hot, bright desert, in front of Dad and a few of my parents’ friends, we played. Just like we’d practiced: Pachelbel, love song, “Danny Boy.” Somehow, we got through it. Somehow, we stayed with the program. We played, and then we spoke at the little wooden podium, and then we sat back down and played some more. And as we played, our notes resonated through the dry desert heat, across the sand, and out toward the distant volcanic hills.
I lined up violin lessons for the kids when William was seven and Rose was five, with a young woman named Angela. She gave lessons on Thursday afternoons in the basement of St. Benedict’s Catholic Church in Cambridge, a town just east of New Concord. I rented a violin for William, and Rose played the same tenth-size violin Ann had played many years before. After a few months, Rose insisted that violin was just too hard, and