The Time We (re)built an Organ

Daily writing prompt

Describe the most ambitious DIY project you’ve ever taken on.

We were so young, “only friends,” and helping the Organ Curator at Oberlin put back together this fantastic instrument.

Yes, as that grainy cameraless-phone era pictureshows, putting together an organ is chaotic work. This was 2010, the year before I graduated and moved overseas to France for more organ studies. I reiterate we did not have smartphones and this is literally the only picture I know of from that whole summer project. I’d been a student Organ Tech employee for a couple of years, mostly holding keys for reed tunings or fixing tracker issues, but eager to learn more about organ building. This wasn’t my first organ building project. We’d already put together a practice instrument… about 10x smaller at least. Now, for context, here’s a video of my amazing son demoing that instrument back in 2019.

Look at that perfect posture! Such creativity at the keyboard. 😂

I actually met Jake on that project. He was recruited for his carpentry skills over Winter Term, and when I got to campus for Spring Term, he was already a member of the team. Our first interaction (other than seeing each other at a distance on campus) was him handing me a screwdriver to put some screws in this exact instrument. And yes, I’ve been an organist for 20+ years, so whatever organ/screwing pun you’re going to insert here, I’ve heard. 😜

Anyway, back to the summer project. This instrument was much bigger. We spent all summer putting it into place and much of the fall. I gave my senior recital on it. We got married in front of it. You can really see how much it came together a few years after that first picture four years prior.

One reason why I value making things, building things, tearing things up, and remaking them, is because of the embodied reality of change, work, and effort it teaches us. Just as that organ required a lot of mistakes, tweaks, effort, blood, sweat, and tears, so has our relationship. No relationship is perfect, and we’ve had our share of difficulties that almost broke us. It’s now 14 years since we flirted in an unbuilt organ loft and very nearly 10 years since we got married in front of God, my church, and of course “my” organ. We were practicing the process of making, communicating, and remaking this whole time even before we were ‘official.’ Building that organ was easy in comparison to building our life together. Speaking of building our life together, we have taken that literally at times.