Three Beautiful Things 03-11-2026: Power Outage Prep, No Winning Wednesday, A Mother and Her Piano

1, In preparation for the possibility that high winds might knock out our power, I cooked three containers worth of chicken drumsticks and party wings. I can cook on our gas stove with an outage, but I thought it would be convenient to have some food prepared. I have a salad I can add to and I'll augment it tomorrow, power or no power. 

2. I find it relaxing to take off on Wednesdays and go Winning Wednesday at the CdA Casino and have a meal at the resort's Red Tail Bar and Grill. Win, lose, or draw, I enjoy making pretty low bets on machines and spinning the reels and not only do I enjoy the food at the Red Tail, I enjoy the servers. I don't say much to them, but the service vibe is good and I like that. 

But, I just don't want to drive in sketchy weather unless I really have to.

I decided the forecasts were uncertain enough that I'd have a more relaxing day if I stayed home.  

3. As I start to write the last of today's 3BTs, I look around me and to my left is an empty Amazon box that had held the flashlights I ordered. This box is situated between two pairs of shoes, one pair resting upon an extension cord attached to nothing, just sitting on the living room floor in a coil. I look straight ahead sitting on a tiny table in front of my chair is a box of a hundred Band-Aids of assorted sizes and on the floor just past the table is a smaller box of Band-Aids that fell off the table several days ago. 

Underneath the table is a composition book barely written in underneath a blood pressure cuff which has a Spokane Symphony program resting on it. There's an empty pill bottle on the floor, a note to myself with Sally's phone number and a grocery shopping list I started.

I'm sitting next to a small end table holding three mugs, four poetry anthologies, three jars of skin cream, wired ear buds, toenail clippers, a knot of remotes, a bottle of lens cleaner, a copy of the Shoshone News Press, a battery powered phone charger, and my laptop's mouse and a pad. 

I surround myself with dish towels, handkerchiefs, washcloths, and microfiber cleaning cloths because I always seem to need to blow my nose, wipe cooking and eating off my hands, and wipe screens clean of dust. 

Why am I writing this detailed description of my immediate environment? 

Well, it has to do with the poem I've typed out below and that I hope you'll take time to slowly read. 

Dorianne Laux writes about the double life her mother lived in Dorianne's childhood home, a life divided between cooking and baking and sewing and playing the piano. 

Like so many poems about music, this is a portrayal of how the mother really only deeply cares about one thing in her house:  playing her ebony Chickering piano. She forgets about wet laundry. She burns the meat. She "accept[s] the embarrassment of a messy house". She's oblivious to the safety pins and rick-rack "hanging from the hem of her dress." 

Lisel Mueller called that place where music can transport its lovers "the nowhere where the enchanted live."

As I can tell from the items strewn around me right now thanks to music, poetry, and writing and readers of this poem can tell from the mother's indifference about her spongy curlers and messy house, if you give in and let yourself go to that place of enchantment, it will occupy your thinking, feeling, and what you care about and, in turn, all those not so enchanting things become second, third, even fourth thoughts. 

The Ebony Chickering

My mother cooked with lard she kept

In coffee cans beneath the kitchen sink.

Bean-colored linoleum ticked under her flats

as she wore a path from stove to countertop.

Eggs cracked against the lips of smooth

ceramic bowls she beat muffins in,

boxed cakes and cookie dough. 

It was the afternoons she worked toward,

the smell of onions scrubbed from her hands,

when she would fold her flowered apron

and feed it through the sticky refrigerator 

handle, adjust the spongy curlers on her head

and wrap a loud Hawaiian scarf into a tired knot

around them as she walked toward her piano,

the one thing my father had given her that she loved. 

I can still see each gold letter engraved

on the polished lid she lifted and slid

into the piano's dark body, the hidden hammers 

trembling like a muffled word,

the scribbled sheets, her rough hands poised

above the keys as she began her daily practice. 
Words like arpeggio sparkled through my childhood,

her fingers sliding from the black bar of a sharp

to the white of a common note. "This is Bach," 

she would instruct us, the tail of his name hissing

like a cat. "And Chopin," she said, "was French,

like us," pointing to the sheet music. "Listen.

Don't let the letters fool you. It's best 

to always trust your ear."

She played parts of fugues and lost concertos,

played hard as we kicked each other on the couch,

while the meat burned and wet wash wrinkled 

in the basket, played Beethoven as if she understood

the caged world of the deaf, his terrible music

pounding its way through the fence slats

and the screened doors of the cul-de-sac, the yards

where other mothers hung clothes on a wire, bent

to weeds, swept the driveways clean.

Those were the years she taught us how to make

quick easy meals, accept the embarrassment

of a messy house, safety pins and rick-rack

hanging from the hem of her dress. 

But I knew the other kids didn't own words 

like fortissimo and mordant, treble clef

and trill, or have a mother quite as elegant

as mine when she sat at the piano,

playing like she was famous,

so that when the Sparklets man arrived

to fill our water cooler every week

he would lean against the doorjamb and wait

for her to finish, glossy-eyed 

as he listened, secretly touching the tips 

of his fingers to the tips of her fingers

as he bowed, and she slipped him the check. 

Dorianne Laux