My Mother's Music

In the evenings of my childhood, when I went to bed, music washed into the cove of my room, my door open to a slice of light. I felt a melancholy I couldn't have named, a longing for what I couldn't yet have said or understood but still knew was longing, knew was sadness untouched by time. Sometimes the music was a rippling stream of clear water rushing over a bed of river stones caught in sunlight. And many nights I crept from bed to watch her swaying where she sat overtaken by the tide, her arms rowing the music out of the piano.