Folly Beach - Dorothea Benton Frank [87]
And, at last, the blessed movers had arrived. I stepped outside into the brisk afternoon air to watch them.
I couldn’t help but to stop and reflect on my piano’s long and checkered history. It was the only thing of any consequence I still had that my mother gave to me. It probably wasn’t worth much but, you know how it is, it had great sentimental value. When I was just a little girl, I had pounded away on the keys in the house where I grew up, eventually learning to play simple pieces under the earnest tutelage of some poor bespectacled old man whose jacket smelled like mothballs and breath like peppermint. It’s funny what you remember and what you forget. Then it moved with me to Aunt Daisy’s where I continued my lessons but I took up dance with a vengeance. In its next incarnation, my piano became Addison’s jumping-off point in Alpine, New Jersey. Now my piano was back where it started on Folly. Full circle. I was dragging that thing around with me like Marley’s chains, except that Marley wasn’t so fond of his chains as I was of my piano. I loved it.
My childhood home, just an old clapboard house up on stilts, was washed away by a hurricane years ago. But I remember clearly how the piano came into our family. My mother bought it used from Siegling’s Music House for my birthday the last year she was alive. I’m told that she always thought I had some musical aptitude and that she thought every house should have a piano, because it added dignity to the home.
Aunt Daisy has pictures of it positioned in the living room of that house but when I look at them I can hardly remember being there, sitting on that bench, practicing scales. I was so little when my momma died and then Daddy, it’s hard to remember much of anything about how life was and there were so few artifacts remaining to jiggle my memories.
Even the land where the house once stood was completely eroded away, which had happened to lots of property on Folly Beach in its history. Beach erosion, which travels from north to south, was great for Seabrook and Kiawah Islands, because they picked up acres upon acres of accreted land traveling with the tides from Folly Beach. But it was devastating for our residents, because the jetties around Folly Beach blocked incoming sand from Sullivans Island. So, as a result, from time to time, second-row houses became prime real estate when the neighboring cottages across the street literally fell apart and into the sea. In any case, the hurricanes and erosion surely served as a Buddhist reminder about the impermanence of all material things.
But the sea-salted population of Folly Beach was nothing if not stoic. They simply shrugged their shoulders, told their stories, laughing and happy at their great fortune to be alive, and then they rebuilt on other land bought with the settlements from their insurance companies. “It’s why we pay our premiums,” became an often-used explanation for why no one worried too much about the weather. Hurricanes were usually simply an irksome fact of life and, to be honest, some of the construction on Folly Beach was, well, long past its prime anyway. In almost every single case, the new homes were sturdier and certainly much prettier than the old homes.
One of the deliverymen came up to me to scope out the destination.
“Where do you want us to put this, ma’am?”
“In the first room, under the window on the far left wall,” I said. “You’re welcome to have a look.”
“Thanks,” he said and stepped inside the door. He came back out, nodded to me, and called out, “Okay guys, let’s get this baby inside.”
Speaking of island construction, the Porgy House was as ancient a beach cottage as there was left on the whole island and I would bet you a dollar that you couldn’t find a right angle in the whole place. The way the house had settled in the sandy yard, probably sinking by a hair each year over many decades, had left the floors sloped and everything just