In this photo, I am singing at the piano in my grandparents’ home in Drake Saskatchewan with my sister in the 1950s. My grandparents bought this piano when my mother was a young girl and she often played the piano for my grandparents when they sang duets together in church.
Here Mom sings and plays her Heintzman piano with me and my sister in the mid-1950s in our house on Home Street in Winnipeg. I can still remember some of the songs like Out in The Zoo and Peter Has New Shoes which Mom taught us when we were little.
My parents had to make do with very little early on in their marriage because my Dad was a full-time student and they had three small children to care for but Mom was never without a piano. Sometimes I think that playing music was as necessary to her as breathing.
My Mom and my sister at the Heintzman piano in our tiny apartment in the interns’ residence at the St. Boniface Hospital one of our Winnipeg homes.
I started taking piano lessons when we moved to Steinbach when I was eight. My parents hadn’t been able to afford lessons till then because Dad was still finishing medical school and his residency.
Practicing piano at age ten in our house on the highway in Steinbach. I took piano lessons from Elsie Rempel in Steinbach for many years.
When I was a teenager my sister and I were featured in the local paper standing beside Mom’s Heintzman piano because we had done well at the Music Festival in Winnipeg playing in many different kinds of competitions including one for duets. We were studying piano with Lydia Wiebe in Winnipeg at the time and my Mom drove us to the city every week for our lessons.
My mother had always wanted a grand piano and when she finally got one she gave her old Heintzman piano to my husband and me. Here our oldest son sits at the Heintzman after we moved it to our first house in Steinbach.
When my parents celebrated their 25th wedding anniversary on Henry Street in Steinbach my sister and I posed in our wedding dresses with Mom in her bridal gown beside her beloved grand piano.
My Dad’s parents had a piano in their home and my sister and I always had to play pieces on it for our grandparents before we received our Christmas presents. There was lots of carol singing too at our Christmas gatherings with my paternal grandparents. My Mom or one of my father’s three sisters who were pianists as well accompanied on the piano.
Our Christmas family gatherings at the country home near Steinbach my parents built in the 1980s always included carol singing with Mom at the piano doing her signature key change segues from one song to the other and often accompanied by one or more of her children or grandchildren who played their instruments along with her.
My husband and I kept Mom’s old Heintzman piano for decades. Both our sons took piano lessons as children and practised on the Heintzman. Here it is in our condo in Winnipeg shortly after we moved into it in 2011. Mom was quite ill at the time and in a wheelchair but she still wanted to try her hand at playing her old piano.
Eventually, my sister was kind enough to have the piano moved to her home because it just took up too much space in our small condo.
My Mom’s grand piano found a home with my niece and she and her husband both enjoy playing it.
All throughout my childhood I remember my mother spending time on Sunday afternoons at the piano playing one piece after the other from memory. It was an oasis in her otherwise very busy life.
When my mother lay dying she used the blankets on her bed as an imaginary keyboard. She would ask me to help her find middle C with her thumb and after I did her fingers would fly across the bedding as she played her favourite pieces.
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