In Harbert, Michigan, there is a delightful shop full of handmade furniture called the Center of the World. For a number of years, Proprietors Lorraine and Terry Hanover hosted a June event called “Woodworkers with the Blues.” Wandering through, I watched a luthier demonstrate the art of violin making. Someone asked how he knew when the desired wood thinness for the instrument’s “belly” had been achieved. The luthier replied that he could tap it “and listen for the note in the wood.” It became, for me, a line in search of a story.

Aberdeen, Indiana, is small, even by Midwestern standards. The streets, some of which are still cobbled in century old stones, wend through town like petrographic brooks.

Citified visitors stopping here on their way through insist that Aberdeen is a properly and intelligently laid-out little burg. “Designed for livability” is the current pop phrase.

The truth is—though we long ago learned it is best to leave people with their illusions—this town was once an inland port on a feeder river. Its tree-bordered byways were simply paved atop old Indian trade paths leading to the waterfront. Where something stood in the way, a boulder, a marshy spot, a dense grove, the local Miami Indians merely ran around it, innocently preordaining yet another curve in the eventual asphalt.

I live on the second story of a defunct grist mill. The main floor, and all of Wellman Street for that matter, is full of trendy little boutiques catering to the tourist trade. They stock locally made crafts: brooms, candles, dolls, quilts, that kind of thing. This upper level was quartered off for storage or apartments, but sat empty for nearly a decade before I faxed the Chicago-based owner to inquire whether he would be interested in renting it as studios to myself and two others. He was delighted to shed the headache of all that undeveloped, vacant space. So happy that he willingly reimbursed us for upgrades needed on the rather rudimentary plumbing.

Who am I?  That isn’t relative to what I’m about to tell. You might say I’m an observer. All three of us in the upper mill are observers of one type or another.

Lyle Tilford is the photographer in Studio #3. His specialties are nature shots—forests, fields, feral creatures—and the chronicling of nearby Mennonite life where such communities are not adverse to having themselves captured and compressed onto silver halide. So demanding is he in what he commits to film, that he even maintains his own darkroom where he can control its development, something not often done in this era of digital dependence.

Molly McDonell inhabits Studio #1 at the north end. She is an eccentric, sixtyish seamstress-milliner who refers to her section as a salon—Maison du Chapeau—and is never seen without some sort of bizarre headgear. Lyle and I often engage in silly speculations as to how she manages to maintain herself in this almost extinct occupation.

“A wealthy widow who escaped the city and doesn’t care if she sells anything or not, so long as there’s enough to keep her and the pet parrot in sunflower seeds,” is Lyle’s theory.

“Molly and Polly,” I giggle. “You know those hats she models are often just disguised parrot perches.”

All of which is way off the point. Observers are like that, we meander mentally the way our streets do physically.

I chose Studio #4 at the south end because its windows face three different directions. The glass didn’t exist in the original building since, of course, the weight and vibrations of the grindstones would have rendered them dangerous and weakened the overall structural integrity of what are otherwise very solid walls. But when the mill was renovated, large thermopane windows were added to both floors. Unlike Lyle, who wants as little illumination as possible in his studio, I regard natural light as a commodity worth reaping three times a day.

Why the need for true light as opposed to the fluorescent variety hanging from the high ceiling?  Pingo, ergo sum. I paint, therefore I am.

Late afternoon, when the shadows are deeply divergent and the sunlight matures into amber, is when I work on the street side of the studio, laying down broad, rapid strokes in oil or tempera to capture the goings on below.

From this vantage point, quite unintentionally, I began observing Schlingmann’s shop.

They are tall and graceful, the row of 19th-century, brick buildings on the opposite side of Wellman Street. I sense a mildly supercilious attitude in the way they gaze across at us from their patrician blind “eyes” made of antique wavy glass. The mill is, after all, a cruder version of what they were intended to be; and it sits like an unlovely granite bullfrog, hunkering over the edge of a fast-moving tributary just above its convergence with the great Wabash.

The shops on both sides of the street are forced by competition into oftentimes garish displays of self-indulgence: flags and whirligigs, tables laden with 50 percent off items, automatic bubble-makers spewing airy, soap globes into the breeze. The toy store has a clown on its payroll for weekends when the throngs are thickest. For awhile the fast-food place up the way assaulted us with tinny melodies from an old calliope.

So Schlingmann’s unassuming sign is nearly lost in the gaggle of commercialism. It is a black metal cello suspended four feet out from the building by a metal rod. Only on the plate glass window is an explanation forthcoming in gilded letters: Violins, Violas, Cellos Custom-Crafted. Repairs and Restoration Services.

It is as unexpected as a working potter’s wheel in the housewares aisle at K-Mart.

I’d made my way in and out of the shops meeting proprietors, chatting amiably and passing out flyers concerning the joint artistic effort being undertaken at the mill, when I got to Schlingmann.

He was then in his late forties with the first flecks of silver sparking fawn colored hair. On our initial encounter, he was bent over a workbench in one well-illuminated section of an otherwise dark interior. As I entered, a juncture of sounds nullified one another; he said, “May I help you?” at precisely the same second I launched into my spiel. We were accompanied by a long, sad moan playing itself out from above.

I halted mid-sentence, mid-word.  A tool set down, the scrape of a chair, the creak of old floor boards, all vaguely registered within the dwindling of the chord. When it was done, I realized I was still standing head back, mouth open, looking altogether unattractive as I gaped into the overhead dimness.

“The other shops, they all have bells or buzzers,” he remarked, syllables marching in a Germanic cadence.

“How did you do this?” I asked, though the apparatus was becoming more visible as my eyes grew accustomed to the indoors.

“Ah, well…” It sounded abashed, humble, not what I expected from a man whose iron eyes and ivory skin might have made him a Luftwaffe poster boy sixty years earlier.

“…um, you see the stick pointing up from the back of the door?  The bow is mounted to it. And over there, you see, are the strings. So the door moves…”

Like its metal counterpart outside, there was another cello within, this one a true instrument which he had suspended so that the bow ran across its strings whenever the door opened.

“That’s really clever,” I said, reaching for the door knob to resurrect the chord. He winced when I did it two more times.

And finally, “Please, if you want real music this is not its best expression. It serves a purpose, but an instrument is at its finest when held by human hands, not a steel strap.”

I had a sense that he might, reluctantly, take from its place on the wall, one of the other members of his visiting quintet. That he would do it as a demonstration, to buy back the purity blasphemed by the untuned sound of the “bell” above. But I also knew how precious an artist’s time is, and was sorry for having broken into his.

“Thank you, but I want to get to everyone on the street before closing. Would you mind if I left some fliers here?  This is what we’re doing…”

He came forward to lean against an ancient, non-electric cash register fronted by a rack full of yellowing sheet music. Folding his hands, he surveyed me—mostly my face, for he was a mannerly person—but this was interspersed with occasional furtive glances at the rest of me.

I gave an abbreviated version of my interrupted pitch. Faint amusement danced about his evenly carved features. A moment of silence, the extended gaze of mutual interest, a subtle, charged sexuality in the air.

Then, quite suddenly, as though a switch had been reset behind the gray eyes, his face went solemn. He retreated elsewhere, perhaps behind the ocular garage doors I imagined rolling down over a humanity momentarily liberated.

“Of course you may leave them. I wish you and the others well.”

Politely dismissive, he was already bending over a flat piece of wood as I left. Crossing the street I wondered if theories on the workings of another mind can be committed to canvas.

At the end of that particularly arid summer when, without movable irrigation machinery, the corn and soybeans would have gone to dust by August, I saw a young girl outside the shop. She was peering into the window, right hand cupped against it. Strange little thing, I thought, in her long, green flowered dress, white Amish prayer covering and sturdy Oxford shoes. A man in black clothes and a woman attired in a larger version of the girl’s frock came along escorting three older children, all boys. They moved steadily up the way, only stopping when the child at the window failed to join them. The mother went back several paces, gently took her hand.

The Amish, along with the Mennonites and the Hutterites, are sometimes called the Plain People. They come to town only for the most pragmatic purposes, i.e. flour, fabric, hardware. Basic essentials they cannot make for themselves. Ambling along a street devoted to gewgaws and gaudy consumerism was roughly equivalent to seeing a habited nun strolling Amsterdam’s infamous red light district.

They disappeared around the street’s curve and from my awareness. Until I saw them several weeks later. This time it was only the woman and the girl, attired now in matched dresses of blue gingham. The child was tugging on the mother, obviously trying to cajole her into entering Schlingmann’s. I smiled, thinking it oddly delightful that her attention should be seized by a dingy little music store rather than the bright toys nearby.

Finally, the mother relented. The pair went inside. I picked up a tube of acrylic, squeezed a minuscule snake of cadmium blue onto the palette and began mixing.

Where does inspiration come from? Perhaps it is always there, surrounding us like dust motes or the subatomic particles of cosmic creation. We are given the responsibility of developing antennae to alert us to its presence, to the subtext that exists if only we can find fitting connections between seemingly disparate items. It is an energy that drives both artist and scientist.

Almost an hour passed before they came out. By then they existed permanently in that part of the Wellman Street mural I was painting one section at a time.

She cut an interesting figure throughout the winter. The wind, with or without snow, charged down from Canada, surging unobstructed across the flat farmlands, bending in a loud, brittle susurrance the remaining cornstalks. It coiled along Wellman Street, tearing at the cloak she wore. I watched, thinking how she resembled a character from a Nathaniel Hawthorne novel, a pint-sized Hester Prynne, or maybe Pearl in The Scarlet Letter.

And I wondered about it all. Particularly when the mother stopped coming and the small, dark-hooded figure ran into the shop for a couple of hours every other week.

One afternoon, when the light was a listless gray and it seemed winter was stretching into an endless corridor, I decided to pay Schlingmann another visit. I wrapped up several slices of walnut bread I’d made the previous evening—one does need a pretext to call on a barely made acquaintance—and marched across the street.

I was looking up anticipating the cello announcement as I entered.

“Hello! Nice to see you again, Madame Van Gogh,” he called out.

Good, he remembered me and what I did.

There was a crisp, almost sweet smell inside, the scent of long ago outdoors. I’d missed it on the first visit. Possibly it hadn’t been as strong then. Now, in the midst of a closed up, exclusionary season, the aroma magnified itself, morphing from pale summery cologne to the rich redolence of winter perfume. The ancient memory of firewood and the warmth it surrenders makes its bouquet a comforting one.

The cello’s vibrations faded.

“Sounds different,” I remarked, pointing upwards.

“Ah, well, every so often my apprentice climbs up and tightens a few things. For a while it all sounds better. Then the humidity changes or gravity intervenes…”

He came forward, friendlier and more relaxed than when I’d left him two seasons ago.

He was an attractive man, minus any tendency towards the prettiness some women so admire. He possessed a tall spareness, an efficiency of figure but one which did not rule out the muscle required to actually go out, select and fell a tree he deemed necessary to an envisioned project.

I leaned on the counter as he approached. Seeing the aluminum foil in my hand, he remarked, “So? This time it is not about fliers?”

“No,” I said from the center of a long sigh. “This time it’s just…cabin fever.”

Momentary puzzlement skipped across his features. Then, “Oh, yes. When one must get out in spite of the weather even when there is work for inside.”

“I should apologize. For barging in. Again.”

“No,” he answered quickly. “This is good. Sometimes I forget to stop. Until I am too sleepy to go on. Yah, I am glad for a visit.”

Eyes twinkling, he added, “And not so often are the visits from handsome women.”

It was the perfect opportunity to inquire about the girl, but my flattered vanity decided to pass on it.

“So, what have you this time?” he asked.

When I told him, I was granted immediate entry to the inner sanctum while he went back to brew coffee.

We chatted amiably. Camaraderie must have loosened up the artist in him, for he launched into an explanation of what he was doing.

“This is called ‘book-matching,’” he said, showing me the split of a piece of sycamore.

Maple or sycamore were the preferred woods. Air dried only, with an eight- to ten- year seasoning necessary to produce ideal tone.

“The grain becomes a mirror image of itself. It will be glued together to form the back of the violin. Done correctly, you cannot tell there is a seam.”

“Which means, I guess, no Elmer’s Glue.”

“Mein Gott, no!” he answered with a flat, pained smile. “One must use good hide glue. If later there is damage, it can be removed easily and without ruining adjacent parts.”

“And hide glue, is it what I think?”

“Yah, from the long boiling of animal parts. Collagen.”

He grew pensive as his attention wandered. When he spoke again, there was an undercurrent of melancholy that mimicked the lonely cello.

“Always we must destroy to create. What we use to make something splendid comes from the death of something else.”

He turned to regard me, piercingly, in a way I could not evade. “This is most unfair, I believe.”

Yes, I thought, while images of the ginning of cotton for canvas, the pressing of seed for oil, even the rude extraction from the earth of non-animated substances like minerals used in paint pigment, all galloped through my head.

Aloud I said, “Isn’t that the burden of the artist, scrambling the elements to make something new? All in the name of beauty.”

Which is, of course, the book-matched graining of Truth.

We exchanged another long look, though this time it possessed no obvious sensual overtones. It was rather a convergence at some level far from, yet still remotely akin to, the flesh.

I didn’t notice the third party’s arrival.

It would have been convenient had it been the Amish mystery child. But it wasn’t.

In his stronger, more disciplined voice Schlingmann said, “This is Jakob, my apprentice. What we were looking at, is his first design. He moved here from Wisconsin to become a violin-maker.”

“Nice to meet you, Jakob. I’m surprised young people are interested in such an archaic method of production.”

“You thought all instruments were made on an assembly line.”

I nodded.

“Not those that are to be concert quality. There are some…‘effects’ that can’t be put into them by any machine.”

He stepped away, began moving tools about on another workbench. Schlingmann glanced at me, then the student, obviously torn between the moment past and the necessity to move along.

“Never impede education,” I said lightly, hand on the coatrack. “It was a pleasure. We’ll have to do this again.”

“I certainly hope so,” he replied with sincerity.

“You’re kidding,” said Lyle. “Hang on. I’ll be out as soon as I finish with this stabilizer.”

The words came from a red glow seeping around the slightly cracked door to his darkroom. I was sitting on a large cushion about fifteen feet away, sipping a glass of cabernet. In the perpetual twilight of his studio one couldn’t tell what time of day or night it was.

“Anyone ever tell you your place looks like a vampire bar?”

“Yes. You. Only last time you called it a bat cave.” He came out holding two clips of still-wet film strips. “You seem to have forgotten—lots of interesting things can happen in the dark.”

I pretended not to notice his wink. “Sounds like photog propaganda to me.”

“Getting brazen in your old age? Just inviting yourself across the street? I’m thinking of being jealous.”

“Yeah. Right.”

“So you’ve sacrificed a half loaf of walnut bread in the name of curiosity. And what do you know now that you didn’t before?”

Slow sip of wine. “Well, I know that he seems perfectly harmless. He’s sensitive…”

Lyle groaned extravagantly.

“… oh yes, the nasty ‘s’ word. Come on, Lyle, all artists have at least a little sensitivity stashed away somewhere. Even curmudgeons hiding behind cameras. Without it, you can’t tune into the world. Or your craft.”

He’d hung the film in a drying box and settled onto the couch whose cushion I’d stolen for the floor.

“God, you’re getting philosophical on me again. You know how I detest all that abstraction. Talking something to death. Art, whatever your definition of it is…well, it’s just something you do. Without a lot of semantical crap. Aside from the sensitive rubbish, any other revelations?”

“And he likes women. The grown-up variety.”

“So you’ve stopped thinking he’s a pedophile?”  

“Well, I’m less sure.”

It was an ugly thing I’d considered. That maybe the girl was escaping her parents, taking off for town. Maybe she wanted freedom from the structured Mennonite life and Schlingmann offered a way out.

“One’s tastes don’t have to be exclusively linear when it comes to sexuality,” Lyle remarked.

“So now you’re agreeing with me?”

He leaned forward, forearms on knees, furrow deepening between his eyes. “Maybe he’s a relative.”

“Living outside their community?”

“It does happen.”

“But aren’t they then avoided by other church members?”

“That depends on the circumstances. If he violated ordnung, the accepted rules of behavior, and failed to fall into line after it was brought to his attention, then he might be subjected to meidung, or shunning. It’s their ultimate punishment. In which case, it’s easier to live among us.”

“Wouldn’t the mother know that?”

“One would think so. She’s courting meidung herself if the kid’s fraternizing outside their society and she doesn’t put a stop to it. Either way, we can’t interfere.”

“But if there is something weird going on…a child’s welfare could be at stake. Surely the authorities…”

“These denominations don’t believe in courts or lawsuits. They govern themselves very efficiently. Judges are not disposed to getting involved in what are regarded as religious matters.

“Besides, you’ve got nothing substantial. Just the by-products of a highly creative imagination.”

*     *     *

That spring they popped up around Aberdeen faster than enthusiastic daffodils. At first I thought it was some sort of Plain People convention. Then I realized that the white organdy Kapps, usually only seen on Amish or Mennonite women, were becoming a fashion craze among teenagers who had, just a year or two prior, embraced the sounds of Medieval Chant.

Funny how religion and its trappings go through cyclical popularities.

They were mismatched, of course, with torn jeans and T-shirts, but one suspects the incongruity was half the fun. When I spotted some Kapps in a downstairs boutique, I stopped to inquire.

“Oh, I had a half dozen here on trial that last weekend before Thanksgiving. They sold in about four hours.

“I told her, ‘Molly, you got the whole winter. Get going on these things.’ She’s been churning them out and stacking them up.”

Several weeks passed. I saw Molly carrying a stack of the white hats down from her studio.

“Need some help?” I asked.

“Sure!”

Her face was a vivid pink beneath its fine sheen of sweat. It was cool for May so the only explanation was the Carmen Miranda concoction on her head. A surreptitious inspection revealed no parrot beside the pineapple.

Molly was most definitely a movable feast of extremes.

“Well, you’ve hit on a bright idea,” I remarked. “Something so local and obvious.”

“It is fairly renegade, I suppose. Dainty clothes, frilly things—young girls don’t go for that anymore. But then, everything gets to be ‘new’ when people haven’t seen it before.”

An astuteness I hadn’t anticipated.

After our third load of hats she suggested a break. We took advantage of one of the benches the city had installed for foot-weary tourists.

In the middle of describing her next bonnet venture she broke off, “You think I’m nuts, don’t you?”

Not anymore. Aloud, “I’m guessing you’re a pretty sharp businesswoman.”

“Gotta give ’em what they’ll buy—or know how to make them want what you’re producing. That’s harder.”

I was assimilating this new version of Molly when the girl scampered into Schlingmann’s. Ran, might be a better description.

“In a hurry,” I commented

“Wants to be sure she isn’t seen.”

“Why?”

Molly snorted. “‘Why?’ Whatever’s going on over there, her kind don’t like music. Consider it worldly. Frivolous. They say God gave them voices and that’s all the music they need. They’re big on that singing, though.”

A world minus music. What a thought.

*     *     *

Over a year passed. Lyle helped me build a loft over the southeast corner of the studio. It became my personal living space and felt like an aviary: I could look down onto a floor divided into an exhibit/selling section with a screened-off work area under my “garret.”

I didn’t sit as often on the street side, at least not during the warmer months when there were often visitors in the gallery. The finished Wellman Street mural adorned that wall and I suppose I felt I was still observing.

My visits to Schlingmann continued. He always appeared delighted to see me. Yet, despite invitations that he cross over for a coffee break on my turf, he never came.

There were three apprentices by this time. His shop had come alive. I kept a leash on my inquisitiveness by making sure I never went on Thursday. Her day.

“Ah!” he said when I opened the cello door. “You must have been reading my mind. Someone gave me a homemade apple strudel and I wanted to repay you all the lovely things you brought. Come. Sit. I put on coffee.”

I was standing beside him and asked what it was he was about to set down.

“This is a soundboard, the violin’s belly. It is spruce—the finest comes from trees grown at higher elevations under severe conditions. They seem to give it better resonance.”

Seconds later, he added, “Like people, perhaps?”

“Adversity strengthens.”

Faint smile, “Yah.”  Pause. “This one is to be a most special violin.”

He was running only the forefinger of his right hand over the piece, working a hollowed out area. Diminutive shavings reared up from the finger plane, settling about the border in a disarray of pine-scented curls.

“The belly must arch out and become very thin along the edge where the ribs will be, to create proper vibrations. Here, I show you.”

He removed the tiny tool, wiped his hands on a cloth, then unwrapped a fully formed violin from another table.

Taking it up, he drew the bow across its four strings. I fathomed—instantly and in a way I could never put into words—why he had been pained by the out-of-tune cello that first time.

A few chords, the hint of a melody, and he set the instrument down.

“How can you tell when it’s thin enough?”  

I asked this less for information than to mask a welling of tears. His wasn’t the first violin I’d ever heard; only the nearest I’d been to perfection.

“That can be done mechanically, using a measuring caliper. But, after awhile you learn…”

Picking up the nascent soundboard, he held it next to his ear, tapping once, twice, along the edge.

“…to listen. For the note in the wood. Is it clear or muddy?  How soon does it decay? And you know if there is more to be removed. Or if it is time to stop.”

“And I thought it was just about the strings,” my voice was a whisper.

“Nothing is only about one thing.”

It was at that moment the door burst open. The cello-bell was obscured by running feet. A frantic rush of words I didn’t understand. Schlingmann looked past me. His face went white.

It wasn’t Thursday but she was there. Now taller, she was still small for what I later learned was thirteen.

He held her by the elbows trying to calm her. She bounced between some dialect and bits of English. The words “they know, they know” sent an icy shiver of renewed suspicion through my veins.

Fearing the facts, I began edging towards the door.

I’d almost made it when he said, “Wait. Please. You may be able to help.”

Oh, no. I won’t be a part of this, I thought. For once, however, my mouth was slow to act on my brain’s conclusions.

“They come. Soon. If I go back…”

It seems so innocent now, as I’m recounting it. At least compared with what I thought was going on. But like everything, there are degrees of innocence. And even the purest of objectives often go awry.

Sonja sat in my old spot, at the window overlooking the street. Watching as I had. But for different reasons.

I let her be. First, because I did not know her or what to say. Second, because there was little we could do but wait for the forces to play themselves out.

Shortly after I took her, at Schlingmann’s insistence, to my place, the first of three enclosed, horse-drawn buggies drew up outside the shop. Bearded men in black trousers and broad brimmed hats disembarked. It looked for all the world like a lynch mob. But of course, these were non-violent men come only to speak.

Eventually, a fourth buggy arrived.

A small cry erupted from Sonja, “Mama!”

The woman went inside. Need I say I was dying to run over and look in the store window?  But that might have tempted the girl to follow. Schlingmann had made it clear this was something the adults needed to straighten out.

“How long have you known Mr. Schlingmann?” I asked, finally attempting conversation.

“Most of my life.”

“He seems a nice man.”

“Yah. He is.”

“But you’re not supposed to visit him, are you?”

“No.”  

It was a soft tremble of a response. I observed the declining light touch her lucent skin, slip past the pale hair, the perfect features. She was a porcelain doll, one I could not picture engaged in the hard work of herding and harvesting.

Heart thudding, I also could not imagine her engaging in sex with someone older than her father.

Finally, the men got back into their buggies. Schlingmann and Sonja’s mother walked across to my place. They came to the point so quickly that I barely had time to recognize the absurdity of what I’d thought.

“My daughter…” It was difficult for the woman to say what she had to, because in so doing she was setting a course from which there was likely no return.

“…she wishes to play the violin. We do not believe in such things. She cannot stay with us. And it would be in bad taste were she to live with my brother.”

Slowly. A dawning. As they hatched their desperate plan of temporary custodial care, the kinship became clear. Lyle had been right to label my misgivings “by-products of a creative imagination,” and I agreed to it all. Immediately. Maybe foolishly.

“I give her the basics and from the beginning, she plays like an angel,”  Schlingmann had said.

It was no exaggeration. I would later witness her extraordinary gift.

“Already, she has outgrown anything I can teach her. But there is a woman professor of music at a university downstate, who is willing to bring Sonja into her family and prepare her for auditions. So eventually she can study in a more challenging environment.”

“We need for her to stay someplace until arrangements can be made,” Sonja’s mother said. “The elders have decided if she leaves, it must be now. Carl,” she gestured towards Schlingmann, “feels you might help.”

And so the girl in the blue gingham dress stepped out of the mural and into my life. Her mother’s doubts were so apparent I once asked her why she’d agreed to it.

“Years ago, I also felt this need. We do not have televisions or radios but when I am visiting the home of a classmate, on her family’s phonograph I heard playing the string section of the Chicago Symphony. I wondered, what must it be like to make such music? Can these wonderful sounds truly be evil?

“But, it is against our way. So I shut off the memory. I did not have the courage to leave the community as did my brother.”

They exchanged a look of mutual resignation, the acknowledgment that each had made a choice which yielded only partial satisfaction.

“One day I saw that desire for music come alive in Sonja. When I heard her play…would God have given her such talent without a purpose?”

Do some people have an obsessive disposition to certain kinds of “making”? Is music, or painting, or the coaxing from stone or wood of some ethereal interpretation of truth, a hereditary predisposition? Even when it goes against the grain of the lifestyle to which they were born?

I have often considered this on quiet, late autumn afternoons when the sky is blue ash and the sun a sickly yellow and dry leaves are all that clatter up the cobbles of Wellman Street. The wind rises and for a moment I believe I can hear Sonja playing as she did during that month she lived here. Practicing hour after hour, stopping only to eat or sleep. Or once in awhile to watch me do whatever it is I do with far less passion than she.

Then it was over. She was off to a future unfolding in the usual circuitous way of things.

She advanced quickly and was playing third violin in a newly created orchestra somewhere in northern Georgia when the news came.

I went out early one morning to find Jakob loading things into a yellow rental truck.

“Going home to Wisconsin?” I asked.

“Not exactly. But I am closing the shop.”

“You’re closing the shop?” I thought he was joking.

“Schlingmann left it to me. Handed me the keys and walked out. Said he was finished with all of it. Only stopped long enough to put that up.”

He motioned with his head towards a somber collection of spruce boughs entwined with black velvet resting on the shop door. I recognized it as the modern equivalent of a Victorian mourning wreath.

Uniqueness decries being dominated by even the purest of religious convictions. Perhaps justifiably so.

Yet sometimes there seems a punishment in going against the established way. Else why would Sonja have ended up dead at eighteen, killed by an angry lover, a budding cellist, a promising artist like herself?  

We contribute to such things unintentionally. All the time. Searching for the perfect note.