Even when life is hard, there is beautiful music
You’ll often find Miss M sitting at the piano in Hope Residence and thumbing through a binder of music
until she finds “Tara’s Theme,” the refrain at the beginning of “Gone with the Wind.” Her fingers hover above the keys, then fill the lobby with chords that swell and fade.
Miss M first saw a piano at age 7, took three years of lessons starting at age 9 and taught herself the rest. She stops at Hope Residence — whose residents live with disabilities — twice a week to play. She’s also spent many hours at the piano at Kingsway Retirement Living next door.
It’s a short drive from where she lives at Boessling Village Apartments; all three buildings are part of the 22-acre Lutheran Home Campus in Belle Plaine, Minn. Boessling’s 24 apartments are available to independent seniors who meet the income requirements. While Miss M has faced many hardships in her life, there has always been music.
“It’s just something I love. I’ve loved it all my life,” she said.
In her former career as a pianist, she played restaurants, hotels and private parties. Sometimes, Miss M would accompany herself as she sang. Even now, she mouths some of the words as her fingers move across the piano keys in the lobby; occasionally part of a verse escapes her lips, but mostly she plays.
Her ear is attuned to composers like Rachmaninoff, Tchaikovsky and Debussy. The music she loves to play includes the classics — “nothing after ’75 or ’80” — Irving Berlin, Frank Sinatra, “Deep Purple,” “Blue Moon.”
“People here seem to like that,” Miss M said.
The Boessling apartment where Miss M has lived for more than two years is the first home where she has no piano; her former residences often housed baby grands. At Kingsway or Hope, she finds a familiar peace waiting when she sits down at the ivory keys. During Miss M’s weekly performances at Hope, residents would rather stop to listen to her play than head to the dining room for supper: They don’t want to miss a performance.
Miss M seems to have inspired Kingsway residents. Sharon Blume is a long-time TLHA employee and current Director of Health Technology Services at Kingsway. Since Miss M began playing, Sharon and other staff have noticed more people
sitting down at the piano to play a tune or two.
“Her piano has added so much to the enjoyment of daily life here at Kingsway,” said Sharon. “While she is playing, people who would have just walked by the parlor will now stop to sit for a while to take in her beautiful music. Pretty soon there is a whole group enjoying the music together.”