I keep a drawer of printed off photos spanning many of the years so formational to my life. In this drawer one will find many different kinds of photos from many different types of places. Some of the photos depict the barely lit mornings spend trying to capture the sunrise as it rises over the east rim of the Palo Duro Canyon, others show the snow-topped Tetons in the fall when I would go and spend time with my grandparents in Wyoming. There is a story in objects and a story in the landscape that surrounds me. I grew up more focused on capturing the landscape rather than the people because that is where my mind was often drawn. In this drawer of photos almost all of the photos I have taken are positive and lighthearted in trying to capture the surreal beauty that surrounds me everywhere I go. In the midst of these photos lies another group of pictures not so lighthearted. These photos carry a weight of the stories they contain along with the lives of people that would be forever changed. With each picture I am reminded of the people I met. With each picture I remember the streets I walked. With each picture I remember the heaviness of a disaster that would alter the lives of everyone I saw around me. Amidst the pictures of mountains and sunrises, a photo of a piano.
Growing up in the 60’s in Houston, TX Carol was a very creative child. She learned every instrument that she had access to and listened to all of the songs that she could find. From a very young age, Carol saw how music affected people and the way that music brought out a happiness that many worked to keep hidden to keep a professional front. Slowly she started learning more and more about music and its ability to unify so many seemingly independent people into a collective community. On her twelve birthday Carol asked for a standup piano for their home so that she could practice her passions anytime she wanted. Carol’s parents were skeptical at first but like many couldn’t turn down the hopeful face of their child and gave in buying her a standup piano for their home in Houston. This purchase acted as a springboard that catapulted Carol into another dimension of her musical abilities. Carol quickly became extremely articulate in many famous piano pieces and was known among her friends as quite the musician. Carol had found something unique to her that helped her to share beauty and love to anyone she met.
Our group arrived in Houston on my birthday, September 21, 2017. We drove into the parking lot of a sponsor church on the outskirts of the city that would be our home for the next week. The gym doors were open wide, and people came flying in and out with full arms of supplies and various items and past a line of others waiting that stretched out and around the building itself and down the street. I stopped and looked but was then quickly handed a case of water and told to take it to the trailers. Confused, I found another person carrying a case of water and followed to the back of the building where four 20-foot trailers were being loaded fully with cases of water bottles. At this point I had no clear picture of any system in place at the church and quickly realized I was not alone in that. This new world was foreign to me and my group but in the way that the local community was working, I could tell that they knew exactly what they needed and how they needed to do it. As quickly as we were dropped off at the church, we were put back in vans and sent away from the church with our vans full of people and supplies.
After homing in on her own skills, Carol quickly realized that she could easily teach her friends how to play the piano as well. She developed different lessons with her friends that were interested and then slowly began to expand that to children that their parents wished for them to learn how to play. Though this new experience of teaching the piano brought another chapter to her story of creating music, Carol always focused on the importance of music and the effects that it had on her world around her. Carol continued to teach through high school and as she became better herself, she was able to teach in high school to older students closer to her age. Carol graduated high school and decided to take on teaching full-time from the front room of her home. While teaching in her hometown she also played on the weekends at one of the local assisted living centers. After playing one Saturday she stopped to eat with her parents when she ran into Tim, a taller young man that served her table at the restaurant. Tim and Carol quickly hit it off and exchanged phone numbers so that they could see each other after his shift had ended. They quickly grew closer to one another and started dating the next week. From the beginning Carol knew that Tim saw her for who she was and who she wanted to become.
We entered the neighborhood on the south side from the street that neighbored with the reservoir. Sandbags lined the fences and entrance to the neighborhood but barely held back any of the water at all from a week ago. We all rode silently in the vans to the park in the middle of the neighborhood. As we passed, I saw person after person trying to find assorted things in the piles of water-damaged possessions that now sat in their front yards. Pile after pile, homes became houses when the people in them were forced from them. What once was filled with laughter and life was now being stripped to its studs and left to dry. We got to the park and unloaded immediately distributing n-95 masks and gloves to each person. I threw the strap of my camera bag around my neck and picked up a bucket of supplies and started walking. For the next 6 days our group would distribute basic cleaning supplies like bleach and scrubs to anyone we came into contact with. I had seen it on TV. In 2004 I watched as reporters captured the decimated streets of New Orleans after Katrina. I watched as my hometown church became a relocation for people to live after being displaced, but because of my age those people weren’t any different from the people that came into the building on Sundays. I had heard stories and seen the news of the aftermath before, but this was different. For a week I walked the streets of a destroyed neighborhood in Houston, TX after Hurricane Harvey.
Carol and Tim got married one year after Tim had finished his degree and they moved into a home in Houston just big enough for the two of them. Though the house was small and packed, Carol convinced her new husband that the piano must be included in the house. With this decision their lives would be filled with music as she played throughout the years and taught countless people the importance of music and its role in shaping the creativity of their minds. Carol continued to teach lessons and run a home for her and her husband. They saw many things in their home on the corner. They saw news of the fall of the Berlin Wall and the sights from ground zero on September 11th. Carol and Tim lived in this home surrounded by thousands of different people with thousands of different life stories and their collective goal was to learn about as many of those people’s stories as they could.
I turned down one of the streets of the neighborhood that ended in a cul-de-sac. In the circle drive, neighbors were sitting in a circle of folding chairs laughing and crying telling stories about different things that had happened on their little street end. I walked down another street where a group from a church down in Mississippi was helping an older man load his refrigerator into the back of a trailer. As I walked, I saw person after person with countless stories in their eyes. Each person looked out on the pile of things in their yard that had once been a part of their home. I saw dining room tables and baby cribs and paintings and records. I saw remnants of past trophies of church league softball and torn high school diplomas. I saw a community coming together to mourn what was lost and help each other in trying to get back to normal. Each person had their own problems but together they were telling stories and bringing back the joy that once filled the now almost destroyed neighborhood. At that moment I realized that what brought life to the neighborhood was not the things on the walls of the houses or the lines of houses that filled each street that I walked down. It was the people and their stories that brought life and turned each house into a home.
In 2011 Carol had gone to the grocery store to fill up on all of the groceries for the week. Upon arriving back at her home, she found Tim unconscious in their bedroom and immediately called 911 in hopes of the responding paramedics to be able to save Tim. After a few minutes the paramedics informed Carol that Tim had died in his sleep. Once a home filled with the laughter and love of two people was now a house of one. Carol’s life was pretty challenging for the next few years trying to figure out what her life would look like after being recently widowed and depending on a salary of teaching the piano to her students each day. Though everything around her seemed like chaos one thing kept her grounded and in tune with the beauty that could be found in life. Carol focused on her music and depended on it to carry her through the uncertainty of her life and remind her when she got down of the joy that she carried and continues to carry when she created music.
One street stood out to me particularly amongst the rest. It winded through the neighborhood, straight in some parts and curving through others. Each house was vacant as I walked down looking for people to help or give the last supplies that we had in the vans. While focused on looking for people I had slowly drifted further away from the group and down my own path down the road. On the corner sat a smaller house, empty looking from the outside and completely hollow after all of the sheetrock had been stripped from the walls. As I walked up something caught my eye. Through all of the chaos I saw Carol.
Carol heard of the coming hurricane and decided to evacuate and go to her cousin’s house further inland until the water subsided and she was able to return. When she made it back to the home, she saw that everything left was either destroyed or completely useless due to water damage. She started to collect things and figure out where everything was when she saw it. suddenly all of the memories flooded into her brain as she saw each key. In the corner of the room, she saw the piano.
I met Carol when I reached the corner of the block where her house was. She was a smaller woman slowly moving through the pile in her yard finding old photos and collecting things that she didn’t want thrown away. I politely waved and walked up to say hello and offer any of the cleaning supplies or water that my now distant team had to offer. She turned down the supplies and told me, “I don’t need anything except for a hug”. We sat down on the curb of the street and for the first time, I think for us both, fully took in the situation that was surrounding us. We just sat. We talked and we cried but we didn’t do anything. We didn’t move a single thing or rearrange the branches from the fallen tree. In that moment all that she needed was someone to sit with her and to listen to her life story, everything leading up to this. I heard about her husband and their life together and all of the adventures they went on together. I heard about their home that we sat in front of and about his passing and how it had affected the rest of her life leading up to that day. We sat for a long time, what seemed like days, and talked for some of it while at other times sitting silent and looking down the road at the other people working.
At some point Carol got up and asked, “did you see my piano when you came by?” I hadn’t, and she brought me over to what seemed like the middle of the pile and through the trash I saw it. A broken piano with each key out of place and up to the top in water damage. She sat back down on the curb and asked if I was interested in music at all. Growing up in the church, I had explained that I sing a lot and she started singing some hymns and we sang and laughed and told stories. It became quiet and Carol started to softly cry once again. I didn’t wonder why she was crying; I didn’t even have to ask. I was the only other person that had seen visibly her life portrayed in the piano in her yard be destroyed in a flash leaving behind only a broken shell of what was. Carol had lost her piano and for the first time in her life, her home was quiet without the sound of the music she played there. Though she was sad about losing her piano that she had owned since her childhood, she told me something that will stick with me for the rest of my life. She said that “it is not the objects that bring joy to our life but the people using them. It is not the piano that brought joy to my home but the people surrounding it. Do not ever forget that the people around you are your purpose. Love them with everything you have and everything else will follow”.
Many of my photos bring me joy like the sunrise in the canyon or bees sitting on the flowers in the New Mexico valley. The picture of the piano brings me something different than all of the other pictures. It brings a reminder that it is not the objects around me that are important but what I do with them to bring joy and love to everyone around me. The piano stands for something greater than itself. It is a reminder that though it is broken, it is the human spirit that perseveres and returns when everything else seems broken or gone. I want to live a life like Carol. A life that pursues the people around me in every way I can and that knows that her purpose does not lie in her possessions but in the way that she lives for others. The piano was her way of doing that, but I know that its destruction did not stop her from loving everyone that day including me.
