I have not played my dulcimer regularly since a month or two before daughter was born last November. I have more or less kept it in tune, and I play a few minutes here and there most weeks.

I’ve found that there are a lot of things I don’t remember how to play, particularly classical stuff. So much comes back in the muscle, audio, and visual memory, but there are gaps.

Since I memorize, gaps mean I’ve got to go back into the sheet music, find the gaps, and learn what’s in them again. And it often means also finding where I’ve rewritten things in my memory and need to learn them again the correct way — at least where I care about there being a correct way or not, like in Bach.

Mark’s new job started last week, and we plan to give him a month or so to get settled into the new patterns and responsibilities before I go out for gigs and such.

But I have plenty of work to be doing just at home, relearning some things, reworking others, and refreshing my memory about more.

Today I took a half hour with a Handel bourree from Water Music — the one the Frugal Gourmet used for his soundtrack, but not at all that fast.

I’m actually sort of glad I’d forgotten so much of this one. Before, I played two voices simultaneously, but didn’t have a good sense of them as separate voices. Now I am working each one separately, keeping one to one hand and one to the other except for one pair of notes that works better switching hands.