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That's the music she plays each morning in the dining room of Wilburn Gardens, an assisted-living community in Spotsylvania County.
Other residents are still finishing their breakfasts as Mrs. Piercey takes out her fiddle, worn with use and patinated with rosin.
Her friend Ed Turney reads from a list of songs taped to the back of the instrument, and Mrs. Piercey starts to play. "Flop-Eared Mule." "Soldier's Joy." "Irish Washerwoman." "Devil's Dream."
Fingers fly across the strings. The bow dances and glides. The tunes are sprightly and inviting, and when the familiar notes of "Amazing Grace" ring from the fiddle, people at several tables hum or sing along.
Music makes Bertha Piercey a minor celebrity at Wilburn Gardens, someone who can always be counted on for a bit of liveliness.
But even if no one else were listening, Bertha Piercey would make music for the love of it.
In the Peters household of Pawnee Rock, Kan., music was a given. Henry K. Peters, a minister, needed it to bring people to church.
He, his wife and their six children, including 6-year-old Bertha, formed a family band.
But Peters came to believe church services needed a more reverent sound than could be had from a clarinet, a cornet, a French horn, a tuba and three trumpet.
So at 12, Bertha Peters got her first violin, and the family band became an orchestra.
The Peters children were good students in addition to being dedicated musicians. But family finances clearly wouldn't cover six college tuitions.
Bertha, who wanted to be a teacher, knew she'd have to earn money and save it. As a high school student she played in her eldest brother's dance band, performing popular songs of the time such as "Darktown Strutters Ball" and "Five Foot Two."
The family moved, and moved again, settling at last in Chicago. There, with several junior college credits already, Bertha enrolled in Northwestern University. She lived at home and took the El to school, an exhausting commute that made her feel tired and out of place among her well-to-do classmates. And tuition was higher than she'd expected
To keep up, she took a job helping at a preschool, and then as a live-in maid to a middle-class family with pretensions to more. The lady of the house quickly established the hierarchy. Bertha would not dine with the family. She would be expected to prepare, serve and clean up after meals. She would know her place.
But after all her work was done, Bertha played the violin. It was a respite, and a statement, too, a reminder of who she really was.
Bertha transferred to the University of Kansas in Lawrence, a state school where she could share an apartment with a brother and minimize expenses.
At church, they made friends with a young lady named Mary Piercey. A few weeks before Bertha's graduation, Mary's brother came for a visit.
John Piercey impressed Bertha Peters. He was a few years older and worked for the U.S. Department of Agriculture, which was sending him to administer programs in Texas. On their first date, they dined at a restaurant where meals cost an extravagant 50 cents each.
They went out two more times, and then John Piercey had to leave. But first he popped the question.
The wrong question.
He asked Bertha Peters if she'd spend the summer traveling with him through Texas.
Absolutely not, said the minister's daughter. "It would be immoral."
"Well it wouldn't," John Piercey said, laughing, "if we were married."
Bertha Piercey thought she could grow to like North Carolina.
John traveled the state organizing textile unions. Bertha raised chickens, hoed and canned and cooked and found a music group to join in Asheville. And she mothered--Alan, Carol, Bruce and Dan by that time. It was a busy life, and it was about to be rocked.
One day, John came home with the news that he'd been asked to be the State Department's labor attache in the Netherlands.
From raising chickens and children, Bertha Piercey suddenly found herself in the role of diplomat's wife. She loved Holland and her Dutch neighbors but hated the embassy protocol.
She quickly learned that she must call on each of the embassy wives whose husbands outranked hers. At the home of each she was to leave a card, after which the lady would call on her and leave a card in return.
Gradually, the Pierceys grew more comfortable with their social obligations, and at one cocktail party Bertha was thrilled to be in proximity to the violinist Isaac Stern. As she moved closer to the group where he was standing, he moved backward and stepped on her foot.
After an interlude in the states, where daughter Elizabeth was born, John Piercey was posted to Norway. Their last child, Fred, was born there.
There, too, embassy protocol required formal visits among the wives. One, a tall, friendly woman, technically should have called on Bertha because John Piercey outranked her husband.
Instead, she asked Bertha if they could do away with some of the formality and simply exchange cards in a park. That's how Bertha Piercey and Julia Child came to have a pleasant chat in the sunshine.
As always, music was a respite from Bertha Piercey's duties of child-rearing and embassy wifing.
Over the years, she had taught each of her children to play the piano, and in Oslo she joined a university orchestra.
In Norway, the whole family learned to ski in the winter, sail in the summer.
The sailing stuck.
The Pierceys returned to the U.S. and settled in Vienna, in Northern Virginia. In her 40s, with her children either in school or grown, Bertha Piercey finally began the career she'd dreamed of as a girl. She taught first- and third-graders in public and private schools for many years.
She and John bought a waterfront farm in Westmoreland County, and on weekends the family would get away to the Northern Neck.
It was fun, but not relaxing. At first they camped on the property, a situation that helped them set some immediate priorities: Before building their cabin, they built an outhouse.
Eventually, Bertha and John Piercey built a permanent home, a big brick house on the shore of Glebe Creek. They retired and went to live in Westmoreland full time.
They sailed and fished and went crabbing. John tapped into a talent for painting. Bertha wrote essays she sold to magazines, and volunteered in the county schools.
And she enjoyed playing, once more, in a community orchestra.
Westmoreland winters didn't hold much appeal, so in the 1980s Bertha and John started spending Virginia's coldest months in the nice, hot state of Arizona.
They liked the freedom of living in a retirees mobile-home court, but Bertha Piercey was shocked to find that there wasn't an orchestra nearby.
One evening, she and John overheard music coming from the clubhouse in their neighborhood. The people inside had violins and guitars but not a scrap of sheet music. The effect was magnetic.
She knew only three "country tunes" of the type they were playing, songs her father had learned as a young man playing for barn dances. She borrowed a violin and played them, and they welcomed her into the group.
For a long time, she just sat in on rehearsals, playing softly when she felt she could join in. Gradually, though, she realized she was learning the tunes without ever looking at a printed note.
Tone was a problem. They jokingly told her they were fiddlers, but she was a violinist.
But she was hooked, and gradually she, too, made the transition from proper violinist to joyful fiddler.
Then on Feb. 16, 1990, John died unexpectedly, after a golf-course fall from which he'd seemed to be recovering.
At first she felt numb, overwhelmed with tasks of everyday life he'd always taken care of, such as bills and taxes and insurance. As she adapted, the real grief hit, the sense of loss and loneliness.
She turned more and more to music and her musician friends.
For the first time since childhood, she could put music first. She performed at jam sessions and fiddlers contests, old-time festivals and fairs. To her surprise, she started winning ribbons and trophies and cash. Sometimes she'd drive herself to competitions, but just as often someone would volunteer to take her.
Those Arizona musicians loved her, daughter Carol Brooks of Spotsylvania County recalls now, and they practically fought for the privilege of playing by her side.
In the early 1990s, Mrs. Piercey published "A Widow's Story," a slim collection of simply written, lyrical essays about learning to adapt without John, and about her love of music.
In 1997, she wrote an autobiography that she shared with her children; that text served as a reference for this story.
No one had to tell her it was time to leave Arizona, her daughter said recently. Mrs. Piercey knew she had to quit driving, that she was getting a bit forgetful, that she shouldn't live on her own anymore. She sold the property in Westmoreland and her mobile home in Arizona.
The musicians there gave her a regretful sendoff, and the local newspapers ran stories. And then Mrs. Piercey moved back home to Virginia.
At Wilburn Gardens, she lives in a light-filled two-room apartment, the walls covered with mementos. There's John Piercey's oil portrait of Dan, who died young after years of poor mental and physical health. There are Westmoreland landscapes, and a picture of a horse in front of a country store. There are countless plaques and ribbons for fiddling, and framed news clippings from the Pierceys' long-ago life in the diplomatic corps.
There are everyday things, too. To remember appointments, phone numbers, medicine doses, Mrs. Piercey writes everything down and consults her lists throughout the day.
She's forgotten some of the details of past events, though the most important ones still come readily to mind.
One son, Bruce, lives in Norway, but the rest of her children are nearby. Al, Carol and Elizabeth all live in the Fredericksburg area, and Fred lives near Richmond. Grandchildren and great-grandchildren sometimes visit.
If there's a lack at all these days, it's in not having other musicians around to play with. For a long time, she made music with another resident, a pianist, but that woman suffered health setbacks and moved away.
On occasion, she'll play a few tunes with visiting bands, but those opportunities are rare.
So she is satisfied to make music for the breakfast crowds, notes flowing, fingers flying.
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