The piano was chunky and crude, but I thought that maybe it was the most beautiful thing I had ever seen. Despite all the whittling, many of the keys stuck together and continual playing gave me blisters and splinters. Several times my father took it apart to shave off a sliver and pack it all together again. And yet I could press a key and hear the note it made; release it and the key would pivot back to a resting position and the sound would stop. The creation of the piano had taken the summer and the best days of the autumn. We should have been gathering and storing food and wood for the winter and, too late, we discovered that music could not sustain us.