Music for my Soul

A while back (a year ago? two years?) my friend Tannie wrote a blog post titled "The Music is for Me" about her journey with playing the flute. She started in school, played some in college, and now (or at least at the time) was taking private lessons while raising her kids. No grand aspirations of sold-out performances or anything like that, she just played because it made her happy.

That post really stuck with me, as I have long since wanted to learn to play the violin again. And now I am.

I started playing in fourth grade, down in the weird basement room of Ellis Elementary where I'm pretty sure they stored the water heaters and monsters. I played all through fourth and fifth grade and into sixth, where I actually made it to first chair violin in the middle school orchestra. That is actually fairly impressive since the orchestra included sixth, seventh, and eighth graders and I beat out all of the older players in my first half of sixth grade. Just because I'm awesome like that.

Then we moved to Washington, where the schools only offered band or choir. Orchestra just didn't exist, so I quit playing.

I hadn't really wanted to quit, but that's how it went. I often talked about wanting to play again, and once I started dating Chris and moved back to Utah, I apparently talked about it a lot. So Chris bought me a violin.

Seriously! What an amazing boyfriend, right?? We were only seventeen at the time (maybe eighteen), and he and Amy put the money in together and purchased a violin for me from eBay.

There have been several times since then that I pulled the violin out and tried to play, but it had been too many years since I had played before and it was too big of a gap for me to reteach myself on my own. I attempted, but never got very far.

Fast forward...once we moved to Atlanta, I had four major goals I wanted to accomplish by the end of the year. Significant progress has been made on all four, but playing the violin somehow wiggled its way up to the very, very top of that list. As fate would have it (or rather, as God designed it), my visiting teacher majored in violin at BYU.

So I asked her to teach me. And she said yes.

I cannot even begin to tell you how exciting that is for me. As poor college students, we don't have the money to pay for lessons, and she agreed to barter violin for life coaching. Double exciting!! I get to learn violin AND coach. Two things that I dearly love to do.

We've only had a few lessons, but I am already drastically improved. There is a lot coming back to memory from years ago, and Charisse is able to teach and correct me in really helpful ways. Ah. It's just so great. We're planning a Skype music recital in December--perhaps I'll have Chris take a video of me playing so I can share my awesomeness sometime.