Having a piano I can actually play means that I’ve been digging into all sorts of old music. There’s Debussy’s Arabesque with its rolling arpeggios, Handel’s Passacaglia with its variations on a theme, a Chopin polonaise with its jaunty beat and Scott Joplin’s piano rags, just because.

But the most poignant find was the book of Brahms’ Intermezzos. How I loved those pieces when I last played piano seriously, and how playing them again brought back the self that played them then: young, dreamy, all of life ahead of her. 

I wasn’t sure what kind of life I wanted to have then, but I knew I wanted it to include writing and music. And now, all these years later, it does.