Prized Possessions

When I’d think of my prized possessions I’d always think of a few things. People think prized possessions are items that hold monetary values. That’s not always the case. And sometimes you don’t even realize what they are until they are gone. Most of my things relate to my mother or my grandmother. My two original best friends in my life. As exciting as it has been to revamp the rental property it’s been equally sad and hard for me. For the longest time, that property has been my home even when I wasn’t living there. It’s where my heart was. It was the first place I settled into after I lost my mom and we sold our home. It’s where I kept all my belongings and where my piano resided. Since I had rented it to my sister I left behind everything. The storage space in it was packed to the rims. Now that we have new tenants coming I had to move/get rid of everything. The past few weeks have been very emotional for me. I’ve had to make decisions about what to keep and what to get rid of. I’ve made a few that I already regret and I made a few that I wonder why I hadn’t made them sooner. One decision that I toyed with for years now was what to do with my childhood piano. My mom got it for my sister and I when I was 8 years old. I took piano lessons from the famous Norma Verrilli. I studied classical piano and was even offered the chance to play Carnegie Hall. (A big regret that I didn’t take her up on it. What did I know? I was a teenager at the time and by that point in my life hated playing the piano. It was a chore to me. Not something I enjoyed.) Yet, almost ten years later, after moving it three times already, I was willing to give it up. (After all I didn’t even like the style or the color of it. Just wasn’t my décor style.) I was willing to sell it, to give it away, to do anything to not have to move it again. And If you have ever moved a piano you know it’s a pretty cost. And when you are married it’s a joint cost; one that your spouse might not justify. Then there’s the whole storage cost. We were looking at $500 - $700 to move it and $120-$150 a month to store it at a special piano storage facility. One he definitely couldn’t justify. And then there was the emotional cost. Could I just give it away, get rid of it, sell it? Would I be okay with that? I thought I was until my sister told me she was having a girl. I pictured her daughter playing that piano. The piano her grandmother bought for her mother and I and it was waterworks. I couldn’t do it. I didn’t have a place to store it, I couldn’t justify the cost to store it but I knew I couldn’t get rid of it. So we bit the bullet and moved it to the place where we were storing all my other possessions. We figured it was climate controlled and wouldn’t be any different then storing it at the rental property all these years. The minute the four guys showed up last Wednesday morning to move my piano I knew I did the right thing. I stood there frozen in time. I watched them package up what I now viewed as my prize possession.

I no longer viewed it as the chore that kept me from playing outside with my friends after school. I saw flashes of past Christmas Eve’s at my mother’s house coming back to me. Where I would be playing the piano and our family and friends would be standing around it singing in the most god awful tune. The memories I will always have, as well as the pictures and maybe I could have parted with it, but when I think of the Christmases my niece Ali will have at our house on Christmas Eve I knew I couldn’t do it. I think how I might give her some of what her grandmother gave to us. Wonderful holidays with family screaming out the “12 days of Christmas” while sipping their champagne. Wonderful memories! Something my mother and grandmother would have loved to have been a part of and I knew again I made the right call. So as I stood there paralyzed as these four strangers carried out my piano I realized at that moment that next to my husband, our family and our friends there wasn’t a single thing in my life as important to me as that piano.

It’s what brought our family together every year. It’s what gave us such wonderful memories of Christmas. Christmas will always be that piano. Not the thousands of lights on our house, or my villages of Dept. 56 houses, or the moving Santa Claus we had, or the three Christmas trees. It will always be my family gathering together and screaming out the “12 days of Christmas” at that piano. 

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What are some of your prized possessions?