The July Playlist
Some years ago I made a list entitled Quintessence Summer Choral Festival Take-Aways.
At the top of the list, I wrote: It will be hard. Really hard.
And then I proceeded to list a bunch of ideas for surviving the festival in the future. Things like “Don’t expect to have time to go grocery shopping.” “Teach only in the mornings.” “You will feel better if you get up and swim even after a late night.” Blah blah blah…
Last week was the 2026 Quintessence Summer Choral Festival. It was hard. Really hard. And really amazing.
There were all the usual reasons for both: The hours and hours of rehearsals. The late nights. The 180 singers in the chorus, each having so many intense feels and individual experiences. The multiple social events. The visiting friends and family: Matt’s sister Mary was here. Friends from Texas. The composer (!!!) and his people. The family of our friend who commissioned the piece flew in from Boston. An old classmate from college came from Denver to sing with her grown-up daughter. (I was her pianist when I was 18 years old. She knew us when we were not yet Matt-and-Amy. Time blurs.)
In the middle of it all, my best friend Lora got married in New Zealand. Spain beat Argentina in the final game of the World Cup. Our dear friends Anne and Dan became grandparents for the first time, a photo of their new grandson (born in China) arriving during our dress rehearsal.
It was enough to make your head spin.
There were moments we were exhausted, running on fumes. There were days we were thrilled by the music and the people, running on adrenaline. Around Thursday afternoon, Matt says to me, “It’s that point in the week where everything makes me weepy.”
Here’s this year’s take-away:
The blessing of this chapter of our lives is that this is not our first rodeo. We know that at times things will be hard. There will not be enough hours of sleep or enough tenors in the choir. Come concert weekend, I will start fantasizing about having maid service at home to clear the dishes out of the sink, make the beds, fill our coffee cups, wash wine glasses.
But this—this music-making/rehearsing/practicing/programming/teaching—is what we do. It is difficult and amazing, magical and ordinary all at once.
The day after the festival ended, I swam laps, taught a half day of lessons and did three loads of laundry. I made the bed, mopped the kitchen floor, watered the plants and filled the hummingbird feeders. We had dinner with friends. The gift of an ordinary day. Or: This is what we do.
This past week marked two significant events in the lives of Matt-and-Amy: our 32nd wedding anniversary and the 23rd anniversary of the day we moved to New Mexico. Here are the precious layers of our lives that we could not have imagined when we were 18 years old.
It's enough to make you weep with gratitude.
The July 2026 Playlist of Practices:
Gardening: June was hot, hot, hot. July has been hot, hot, hot. Even with my eye on establishing a desert drought-friendly garden, I water. I fill bird baths and hummingbird feeders. I move succulents into shady corners and set pots of herbs and geraniums under the big blue umbrella to protect them from the fierce mid-day sun.
One morning earlier this month I was up before dawn doing yoga when I noticed that the cats were hovered at the sunroom screen door. Looking out, I saw a fox who had jumped up on the short brick wall and was drinking out of the birdbath. He/She/They stopped drinking long enough to gaze in at us, peering out at him. “Wow!” I whispered to the cats who were paralyzed with attention and curiosity. “Just look at that.” We stared at one another for 7 seconds, and then the fox bounded off into the darkness.
It was pure magic. All the feels.
Writing (from The Present Perfect. July 2023.):
Last week I got this postcard from a Little One traveling abroad with her family:
Dear Ms. Amy, I have been missing you…
I loved everything about this. And wow! what a great use of the present perfect progressive tense. I have been missing you…The missing of the piano teacher took place in the unspecified past and is ongoing. Of course it is. You never stop missing your piano teacher.
While one of the assumptions behind practice is that it is something you return to day after day, good mood or bad mood, inspired or not, every now and again a break in routine is a good thing. It gives us a chance to miss things: our cat, our piano teachers, our beds. It gets us out of our ruts, turns our perspective upside down, rattles our cages. “Why don’t I try….” we think, and suddenly a new idea is born.
Summers, in general, have a way of doing this. The release from our relentless schedules frees up the part of our brains that otherwise settles deeply into the same old patterns. There is nothing like an empty summer afternoon to spark a bit of new thinking. In order to do something really creative, one has to be slightly bored. Sometimes in our mad world of busyness, we forget that simple truth.
… This summer might be one big present perfect progressive tense. There are the cats, annoying in the unspecified past, but also in the present. Or maybe they just are really hot in these days of relentless 100+ degree temps, equally uncomfortable in the recent past and in the present. To survive, I have been existing on watermelon and ice cream, supplemented by the random cold beer or chilled Orvieto Classico. I have been swimming every single day at dawn. Our schedules are full this month: I have been seeing friends and former students, my nephew has been visiting. I have been working through 7-hour teaching days, and putting in long hours at the piano in preparation for some upcoming rehearsals and performances. I have been watering the garden every evening—triage watering I call it—in an attempt to keep the geraniums and herbs alive. Even the cacti and succulents have been looking withered and parched, depleted and reduced and dehydrated, much like a diminished chord, now that I think about it. Which is exactly how I feel.
Because admittedly, sometimes I have been cranky about much of this, both in the unspecified past and in the present. The world is not getting cooler any time soon. There will always be too many demands on our time and good humor, and not enough hours in the day. We will always need to be creative with the compositional makeup of our lives: some major chords, some minor ones, and some days depleted, reduced, diminished harmonies are going to insert themselves into our routines. And so, as always, there are many things to practice, both today and in the future.
I have been practicing.
Reading: Eight-year-old Alice and I were discussing books. She had just read “a really great book! Miss Amy! You would love this book because the main person lives in a magic house. Just like your house!”
My house is a magic house? This I have never considered. “Tell me more. What makes it a magic house?”
“You know. Because it has lots of colors and fun things to do and look at.”
I’ll take it. If a kid thinks their piano teacher lives in a magic house, I’m doing something right.
I’ve been talking about books with students for decades. Almost 30 years ago, my student Kathryn introduced me to the Harry Potter books she had discovered on a trip to the UK. (They were not yet published in the US. Kathryn and I were ahead of this trend.) I swap book recommendations with my now grown-up kids, Kristen and Leslie, all the time. Over breakfast with Henry, a college kid and favorite former student, he asked me, “What are you reading?” I told him how much I loved The Time of the Child by Niall Williams. A few months later he texted, “Amy, I loved The Time of the Child too.”
I also love to talk about houses. Henry was the kid who once said that my house was “definitely neat, and kinda fancy,” a compliment I will take, even if lately that might be a stretch of the imagination (See above: no maid service.). Former students coming to tea as adults with newly established apartments will notice things for the first time, “Amy! You have plants!” (I always have.) A Little One was recently overheard in the sunroom saying to her mother, “You know why I love Miss Amy’s house? Because it is SO SMALL.”
This summer has included a much-overdo “refresh” on our ONE small bathroom and some necessary windowsill repair. Any project is a can of worms, demanding further purchases or tasks (Knobs to buy, walls to paint, hardware to install). There is so much plaster dust, and noise, and inconveniences to negotiate. Neither the cats nor I like disruption to our routines. And of course, all of this has been taking place while I was trying to teach. Think of the yogi trying to meditate in the middle of a crowed Indian market and you get the idea. Fun times.
Have I mentioned we have the ONE bathroom?
On a recent trip to Lowe’s, I made the mistake of walking into the kitchen cabinet area and opening a drawer. It slid open with no effort whatsoever. Unlike our kitchen drawers, some of which aren’t even functional at this point, but all of which need two hands and a lot of patience.
Now I’m strategizing for new kitchen cabinets. (See above: Can of worms.)
But all of this is probably why when I was browsing my bookcases for something to read recently, I rediscovered Winifred Gallagher’s Home Thinking: A Room-by-Room Look at How We Live. This is a deep look at the power and magic of homes from a thoughtful writer. It reminded me of another book I once read by the same author, Rapt, where Gallagher talks about being diagnosed with an advanced and “particularly nasty” form of cancer. She writes that she decided “This disease wanted to monopolize my attention, but as much as possible, I would focus on my life instead.”
As this summer of 2026 finds its shape, we have been practicing, refocusing our attention to blur out the chaos all around us. We water our garden and long for monsoons. We sweep up plaster dust and repaint the walls of our sweet home. We tend our flocks, teach our lessons, rehearse our choirs. We raise our glasses to the music and to this bittersweet, layered, precious chapter of life. This is what we do.