Seven years ago, I would have emphatically denied the possibility that a day would come when I would sit at the piano and feel, as I ran up and down a simple C Major scale, a rush of heady elation.

You see, seven years ago at this time I was determined to become a classical pianist. Madeleine L'Engle's A Small Rain had gone straight to my head. I was practicing my heart out a minimum of two hours daily...and that heady rush was reserved for the moments when I'd finally mastered the three against four rhythm, or nailed that tricky sinfonia trill, or expressed a phrase with all the poetry in my small but fervent being. C Major scales were old hat. Yawn.

By the time I started college, however, I had resigned myself to the truth. I would never be Vladimir Horowitz. Katherine Forrester's turbulent, romantic future would not remotely resemble my own. I settled into the teacher route (thinking: who doesn't love Anne Shirley, Christy Huddleston, or Jane Eyre?--teachers, all), and let music fall to the wayside.

Last week, however, after over a year of abstinence from those glossy black-and-white landscapes, I was given the push I needed to revisit them. I sat down at the bench and executed a brisk C Major scale.

Dear old C Major. I've missed you.

It was getting a whiff of news about a long-neglected friend. It was driving past a childhood haunt and finding it unchanged. It was smelling the unique perfume of some forgotten room. Clinging to those bits of ivory, captured beneath that polished black piano lid, connected to those duckbilled pedals, was a piece of my identity just waiting to be remembered and enlivened.

Sure, I know I won't be Katherine Forrester, falling desperately in love with her tortured mysterious piano teacher while becoming a renowned musical enchantress. For that matter, I probably won't ever be a Jane Eyre, Christy Huddleston, or Anne Shirley. I am Abby Pettit, and I won't know what that means entirely until my life is sealed. But I'm learning as I go.

And last week, a very exciting C Major scale taught me that Abby is a pianist, in her own small way.