I always think of Mercedes Sosa’s song that says: “Uno vuelve siempre a los viejos sitios donde amó la vida” (“We always return to the old places where we loved life”). And every time I hear it, I feel it is profoundly true. We return in memories, in dreams, in places, in old hobbies… anywhere we rediscover the happiness of a forgotten version of ourselves. And then, as Mercedes also says, we understand how absent the things we love have been.

Something like that happened to me last year. My Dodo bought me a digital piano for Christmas. We had talked about it many times, always hesitating: money, time, living in an apartment with neighbours. But one day she decided, and the piano arrived at the house.

That moment brought me back to my very first keyboard: a Yamaha PSS-130, tiny, 2.5 octaves, just a few sounds. And suddenly, returning to the present, there was this new 88-key monster in our office (also a Yamaha). More than ten years had passed since I last studied piano or music. How was I supposed to tame the beast again?

And why did this matter so much to me? Because music has always been part of my life. On my father’s side, everyone is a musician. They may be doctors or teachers, but they are musicians all the same. Dad and his siblings all play instruments. Dad plays violin, piano, and cuatro by himself. My uncle plays the cello, and my aunt, who passed away many years ago, sang and played the cuatro.

For Dad, kids needed extracurricular activities; staying home after school was not an option. That’s how he had been raised. And my mom was the one who made it all possible, driving us to every music class with endless patience.

Every Thursday, I had theory music classes: solfège, ear training, music history, and basic harmony. None of it really clicked for me back then. I knew how to read music, and for me, that felt like enough. Saturdays were piano lessons with my teacher, and that, unlike everything else, I loved.

I practiced on an old family pianola. A very old one, the kind that needed expensive tuning every year. But it followed me through all my piano-learning years, ever since I was nine.

Was I a prodigy destined for an orchestra? I don’t believe. But I didn’t care either. I was learning and moving forward. The instrument gave meaning to everything I learned in theory classes. And that was enough for many years.

Then university arrived. I moved to the capital, and a piano is not exactly portable. I tried to play on the choir-room pianos or in the auditorium in my faculty, but I gradually stopped going to lessons. I couldn’t attend the music school in my hometown anymore, and life filled up with new projects. Music became just a hobby, something like: “Yeah, I know how to play piano,” said casually in some random conversation.

So when Dodo brought home the new piano, I felt something open again. I didn’t want to become a prodigious pianist or change my life for a new dream (and I am pleased with my current life). I wanted just to pick up where I left off… and this time, with real attention.

I contacted my lifelong piano teacher, and we started weekly online lessons in January. We met again after so many years, doing scales, Venezuelan pieces, and Czerny studies. I also reached out to a good musician friend to finally learn harmony and intervals properly, and to work on all the gaps I had left untouched.

And with each lesson, with all the patience that comes from being an adult who truly wants this and is willing to make space for it in her routine, I rediscovered how much I loved Venezuelan music on the piano, how rewarding it is to tackle all the exercises, and how beautiful romantic music on the piano is. I learned how fun it was to compose a little, even if it was just a few measures, or even a bit of modern counterpoint.

And I found myself learning again about all those great minds: Bach, Czerny, Vicente Torrealba, Soto, Palestrina… And through all of this, something became very clear to me: there is always time. Even many, many years later.

After a year, the piano has become that old friend again, the one you return to after a long day of work in Versailles, or that visit you on a quiet Sunday afternoon in Beaugency. And as Mercedes said, I understand that love is simple… and how sad it feels to know that I let time devour something so simple.