Speaker 1: US Studios The Music box Collection. In a small apartment
on the third floor of a brown brick building, there
lived a woman named Melody who collected music boxes. She
had fifty of them, gathered over the course of thirty
years from flea markets and estate sales and quiet corners
of antique shops. They sat on wooden shelves that lined
one entire wall of her living room, each one different
in size and shape and tone. Some were tiny, no
larger than a walnut, with delicate brass mechanisms that turned
almost faster than the eye could follow. Others were larger,
wooden boxes with hinged lids and brass keys that needed
winding with careful, steady turns of the wrist. On quiet evenings,
when the world outside her window grew dark and the
street below grew still, Melody would settle into the old
armchair by the lamp and begin to wind them. She
would start with the smallest, a tiny silver thing she
had found in her grandmother's attic when she was seven
years old. Its tune was only twelve notes long, but
it was a tune she had known all her life,
and it sounded like the first warm day of spring.
Then she would wind, the next and the next, moving
along the shelves in a slow, deliberate order she had
developed over the years. Each box played a different song.
Some were classical fragments of pieces she half remembered from
childhood piano lessons. Some were folk tunes, melodies that had
been carried across oceans by immigrants long ago. Some were lullabies,
simple and repetitive, the kind of songs that mothers hum
without thinking. And some were melodies that had no name
at all, just sequences of notes that someone had arranged
once and that had survived in the mechanism of the
box long after the composer had been forgotten. On this
particular evening, the rain was falling outside, a soft, steady
rain that tapped against the window like a thousand small fingers.
Melody had lit the lamp and made herself a cup
of tea, and now she was winding her way through
the collection. The smallest box sang its twelve notes. Then
a wooden box shaped like a miniature piano played a
chopin waltz. Then a round tin box with a picture
of a windmill on the lid played something Dutch and bright.
The music filled the room slowly, layer upon layer, like
drops of paint falling onto a wet canvas. At first,
the melodies were distinct, each one clearly separate from the others.
But as she wound more boxes, the songs began to
overlap and blend, weaving together into something new, something that
was not any single melody but was all of them
at once. The sound was strange and beautiful, like hearing
a hundred different conversations happening in the same room and
finding that they somehow made sense together. Melody sat back
in her chair and listened. The rain continued outside, the
tea grew cooler on the small table beside her, and
the music boxes sang on, their tiny mechanisms, turning slowly,
their little bells and combs and cylinders, doing what they
had been built to do so many years ago by
craftspeople whose names no one remembered. The room was warm,
and the light from the lamp was soft, and the
music was complicated and imperfect and full of strange harmonies
that should not have worked. But did. She thought about
how each box had arrived in her collection. The silver
wand had come from her grandmother, who had told her
it was older than anyone could remember. The wooden piano
shaped box had been a gift from her father on
her twelfth birthday, bought from a shop in the city
that had long since closed. The round tin box with
the windmill had been found at a flea market in
a town she could not name any more, bought for
two dollars from a man who had seemed glad to
see it go. Each box had its own story, its
own history, its own particular way of being alive. There
was a box she had bought for her husband when
they were first married, a small mahogany thing with brass
feet that played their wedding song. He had died eight
years ago, and the box still sat on the shelf,
but she had not wound it in years. She was
not ready. Some songs were too close to the heart
to play without crying, and she had learned to be
careful about when she allowed herself to cry. The music continued,
the harmonies built and shifted. The rain tapped on the window,
the tea cooled, and Melody listened with her eyes half closed,
letting the layered melodies wash over her the way a
bath washes over a tired body. The music was not
sad exactly, but it was not entirely happy either. It
was something in between, something that acknowledged the passing of
years and the smallness of any single life, but also
the great, quiet persistence of beauty in the world. After
a while, the boxes began to wind down one by one.
The tin windmill box slowed first, its tune trailing off
into silence, then the wooden piano, then the silver grandmother box.
The larger ones kept going for a while, their longer
songs playing out at their own pace, but eventually they
too fell quiet, and the room grew still except for
the sound of the rain. Melody opened her eyes that
looked around. The lamp was glowing warmly, The shelves were
lined with their silent cargo. The rain was still falling.
She thought about how strange it was that such tiny
machines could make such beautiful sounds, and how strange it
was that she had spent thirty years gathering them, and
how strange it was that on a rainy evening like
this one they could make her feel so completely at peace.
She rose from her chair and walked to the window. Outside.
The street lights were glowing softly through the rain, and
the trees along the sidewalk were dark and still. She
pressed her hand against the cold glass and stood there
for a long moment, breathing slowly, listening to the last
of the rain. Tomorrow she would wind the boxes again.
Tomorrow the songs would rise and fall and overlap and
weave together into something strange and beautiful. Tomorrow the room
would fill with the sound of fifty small voices, singing
their own songs at the same time. But for now,
the room was quiet, and melody was ready to sleep,
and the rain was still falling. And that was enough.
That was more than enough.