She played at Jean-Pierre French Bakery for three and a half hours on Saturday morning. On Saturday afternoon she taught piano lessons. At 5:00 PM she hightailed it out of the house and down to Main Street to catch the last few minutes of the retail business day and the first few minutes of dinner out on the town. It is a good thing to do on a Friday or Saturday night; take your laptop or handheld device and do a bit of proof-reading or writing in a quiet corner at a table for one while live musicians play and others around you unwind from the office week. At The Office restaurant and bar at the Strater Hotel, the musician was singing solo accompanied by his ukulele. He sang the standards spanning the last 60 years and once in awhile threw in an original. She recognized his name and his style though she doesn’t know him well. She stepped back to the restroom, poked her head in the doorway of the Diamond Belle to see the ragtime pianist (one of five). Very good, but not one she knows well. When her food order finally came and she had written a chapter, she gave a cursory glance at Instagram before heading out. She clicked to follow up on a Jean-Pierre story thinking she might catch a photo of herself at the piano. Monkberries! Oh. That’s tonight! Monkberries are playing in the garden at the Rochester Hotel. Now the Monkberries are a partnership of two. The songwriter, arranger and guitarist happens to be one of the managers at Jean-Pierre restaurant. He also happens to be one of the guitar private lesson instructors at Stillwater Music. She hastened her departure from The Office, hurried to the garden at The Rochester, enjoyed a song or two before being hailed by an incoming group of six all decked out in evening black. It was half the serving crew from Jean-Pierre. At two minutes until eight, after a Beatles tune, she slipped quietly out the garden gate to make her way in the direction of home. Across the street live music was still in full swing at Lola’s, the food truck lot. Sounds of trumpet, mellow like a cornet. Ah, yes, Jared, the leader of the Durango Wind Ensemble along with a couple colleagues. She paused for a moment and wondered if she should cross the street and identify the two colleagues. She thought of walking to either end of Main Avenue to see if she knew the musicians at Gazpachos or 11^th Street Station or Esoterra or the street pianos in-between. But no, Sunday morning comes early and she herself will be back tickling the ivories at Jean-Pierre after a refreshing Saturday Night of Live Music.

It was an evening trip to the grocery store. The crowd had thinned. As I neared the deli and bakery area I heard singing. Vocalizing. Not a tune or words I recognized, but clearly with secure vocal quality and pitch. I rounded the end cap, negotiated another aisle and then, my curiosity got the better of me. I felt I had stepped onto the movie set where the Greatest Showman follows the voice into the laundry and discovers Keala Settle. I positioned myself to peer back into the bakery area from whence emanated much clanging and sounds of cleaning and reorganizing of pans – accompanied by singing. Solid. Secure. Unself-conscious. An average, ordinary middle-aged woman, dressed in traditional bakery white, hair confined to a hairnet – and she was singing.

My usual habit is to walk to the supermarket when I run out of something – or maybe a day or two after. Instead, we made this grocery run in my roommate’s truck in order to stock up on flour for the pizza crust and sourdough, tomato sauce and other canned goods, and heavy items. On the way home I commented, “Did you hear the woman vocalizing in the bakery?”

“Yes!” exclaimed my anthropologist roommate, “wasn’t it a delightful throwback to when women sang about their work?”

When women sang about their work! When did we lose that? Fortunately for our soul-health, we retain a good deal of musical ambience in this music town!