Six weeks after the lakehouse, December settled cold over Nashville. I walked into Carter Vintage Guitars looking at Martins and high end Taylors. The sales guy recognized me from session work around town. We have a seventy four Hummingbird in back if you’re interested, he offered. Close to what you had. I shook my head. No, I said. I’m looking for something different. He handed me a Martin D-28 instead. Bright tone, clean cut through a mix. I played a few chords and it sounded different. Not better, not worse. Just different. Less warmth, more clarity. Thirty five hundred dollars. I’ll take it, I said.
That night I brought the Martin to my studio and played for two hours, adjusting to the new feel, the new tone, the new resistance under my fingers. It was not my Gibson. It never would be. But it was mine. I started learning a new instrumental I’d been writing, called Underwater. The Martin handled it differently, requiring different technique, different dynamics. Some things simply cannot be replaced. You just learn to play something new instead.
Over the following months, updates trickled in through cousin Sarah, who became something like a bridge back to family news everyone else had abandoned. Derek lost his job in February, unable to commute without a car, refusing the remote position his company offered because he considered it beneath him. He ended up at a credit union, making fifty eight thousand a year, down from one seventy five. Clare got her first job in twelve years, retail management, thirty six thousand annually, with Tyler now in after school care that he hated. The house went on the market, two months behind on payments already. And Tyler had two suspensions for fighting at school, a counselor saying he was processing family trauma, asking about me constantly.
