It’s coming up to the last few weeks of summer, and I’m doing all I can to get ready for a busy concert season beginning in the fall. The more I can prepare now, the smoother the coming season will be. My kitchen wall is a mess of printed-out monthly calendar pages haphazardly taped with blue painter’s tape between historic railroad maps of Oregon and an embroidery of my deceased guinea pig. I have written my event dates (about 100 so far), my husband’s concerts (Jason is an incredible cellist and conducts the Corvallis Youth Symphony), and key events for our teenage daughters, who have concerts and competitions of their own.

This year is my busiest since leaving Germany, where I was a member of the Artemis String Quartet. The Artemis kept a robust international touring schedule, with seven managers in seven countries, publicist, and a personal secretary. Beyond a touring schedule of around seventy concerts, we were making recordings and serving as professors at the Universität der Künste Berlin and Master Teachers at the Queen Elizabeth in Brussels.

I felt, during those years, that my feet never actually touched the earth. Such a whirlwind of travel, rehearsal, teaching, and high-pressure concerts! Our kids were small, and I missed out on so much. Birthdays, school events. To this day, Jason and the girls banter about things they did or saw, things I’ll never know about or be able to share. But that’s the trade-off for being an obsessed classical musician. The curse of practicing so much and succeeding in a way that looks, from the outside, like an enviable career, is the distance it creates to the people that matter the most. What’s the point of coming home from tour if you have no one to come home to?

In the years since returning from Germany, I’ve been chasing that illusive work/life balance. That’s a particularly tough one for a musician, especially if you don’t have a stable job in education or orchestra. The tradeoff for my unconventional, erratic life is tremendous satisfaction, personal choice, and crafting a life of excitement, travel, and variety.

I’ve been concentrating on being a mom to two teenagers, building my Oregon music life, and finding the right balance of in-state and out-of-town activities. For out-of-country tours, I’ll only play if Jason’s in my group and we can bring the kids. That is one tour to Germany every year, and one other fun place. All of this depends, naturally, on what my kids need of me, how much support Jason can give me, and what I need for myself. It’s an interconnected spiderweb of a life, and I love every minute of it!

Looking at my packed schedule, it’s going to require a surgeon’s precision to manage my every minute. These days, I have four chamber groups touring, a book coming out, concertos and solo appearances, a radio residency, a music academy, and book events such as festivals and readings. I’m serving as Ambassador for the Oregon chapter of the American String Teacher’s Association and I have 30 students. And I’m deep into writing my second book. I have a great team helping me out – a manager, a literary agent, publisher, publicist, handful of employees for my summer camps, and two assistants. And two guinea pigs. They keep me grounded.

So, how’s it all going to work, you ask? My first job is to line up my repertoire for the year, then decide when I need to be concert-ready on each piece, and how long that will take per project. In classical music, there is no such thing as procrastination. We all know the fear, the public humiliation of a concert under-prepared. That’s just not going to happen.

I did, once, underestimate my practice. It was when I was in that hazy time in life, when you are both a student and starting to make a career. Half child, half adult. I no longer had someone checking on my progress, making sure I was ready. And this particular concert was my Kennedy Center debut. Bach Chaconne: one of the most demanding pieces for solo violin, both technically and emotionally. It didn’t occur to me until I was standing in the wings that I was terribly underprepared and could potentially fall flat on my face. My entire body felt like someone had poured ice cold water into my veins, and I was seeing spots. My feet felt glued to the floor, and as the applause started, the stagehand nudged me to go out. It’s not like I didn’t know the piece or hadn’t practiced. I’d been playing it for more than ten years, had practiced it hundreds of hours. But I was just coming off a huge tour to Central Asia where I hadn’t had enough time by myself to practice, and I had massive jetlag. I was ready for a small concert. Just not this big stage, this big expectation.

In the end, all was well. But I’ll never forget that feeling. Like waking up from a nightmare about being in high school and you forgot to go to a class all semester and you are staring at a test that you can’t possibly comprehend. But it wasn’t a dream. It was real. And I’ll never repeat that experience. I’ll always have a year’s worth of calendar taped to my wall, sticky notes on my window, a family to check in on me, and guinea pigs to ground the entire experience.

I slept until 11:10 AM today, my plans for an early, productive day completely shot. Turning over, I stretch my weary arms, looking down at the illegible blue markings on my left hand.

I often half wake-up many times per night, grab a pen, and write something on the back of my hand. What does it say this morning? Maybe “Schubert, Yoga, T Pick, M Tchaik, Pigs, and Fred.” I’m sure it will all become clear once I get some coffee coursing through my veins.

Yesterday was the end of my Inside Music Academy Chamber Music Workshop in Corvallis. It’s been exhilarating, exhausting, challenging, and rewarding to see these students, age 10 to 76, crave the work necessary to pull off major repertoire, and to find new ways of working together, supporting each other, and pushing themselves through difficulties.

This year we had 85 students, 20 of them staying with host families and Airbnbs, and 4 staying with Jason and me in our ramshackle, sprawling house, surrounded by trees so tall I can’t see the tops, baby deer in the back yard, guinea pigs squeaking in the living room, turkeys gobbling up the drive, atop a steep hill in Corvallis.

Looking at my watch at the end of this week, it shows I am clocking 6 miles a day on my feet. But that’s not jogging. That’s running from room to room at camp, setting up stands, meeting faculty, doing errands, and mostly just energetically coaching Beethoven, Smetana, Ravel. No wonder I am exhausted. Plus demonstrating, playing along, and leading the orchestras from the concertmaster (first violinist) seat. My shoulders feel like mechanically separated meat product. No wonder I wrote Yoga on my hand.

As I slide into yoga, just a couple of minutes late, as usual, I see a wave from one of my regular concertgoers – he’s made a little space for me next to him. It’s during this next hour that I will untie the knots in my back and arms, untie the knots in my head, and slowly make a plan for the rest of my day. By 8 pm, I have to be at the University of Portland, checking into the dorms, ready to teach for a week at the Delgani String Quartet Academy. And I have to get there with the list on my hand completed.

It was a successful week in Corvallis – happy students, happy parents. Jason and I had an autistic college student staying with us this week – a boy we have known for 6 years. He doesn’t sugar coat anything, he’s brutally direct. Many of his sentences start with “I don’t mean to be disrespectful” and the next part can go something like “but I think that people who are playing the melody need to play louder. It’s just too soft. No one can hear that.” True, true. It was a hilarious card game of B.S. he played with my 14-year-old daughter and friends the first night. The combo of his bluffing style and the fact that he had memorized the deck of cards meant that no one could get away with anything. He won handily.

And so – the back of my hand. Yoga. Yes, happening now: Schubert. Jason and I play the Schubert Trio in E-flat Major with pianist Hunter Noack this week, live on All Classical Radio and then for 2 concerts as a part of his stunning series, IN A LANDSCAPE: Classical Music in the Wild™. I haven’t had a second to practice. 2 hours should do it. The next thing on my hand: T Pick. We won’t be back to pick our older daughter up from visual arts camp in time – I need to find someone to get her from Salem to Corvallis, a one hour trip, on Friday. Our younger daughter needs help practicing her Tchaikovsky Sextet – she’s the youngest member of a group tackling the fiendishly difficult Souvenir de Florence by Tchaikovsky, and rehearsals start tomorrow. I need to give her left hand violin fingerings before we leave, that should take one hour. And we can drop off our guinea pigs on the way out of town. My daughter’s friend lives on a farm, and our two pigs love to spend time there, romping around the yard with the other farm piggies.

And finally, Fred (All Classical’s President & CEO!) I’m supposed to write my next blog post. So here it is. All typed and ready. I wash my hands, the ink naming tasks for today dissolving down the drain. I’m in my dorm room, Jason is snoring in his bunk bed, it’s 10:47 PM, and I can’t wait for another week to start tomorrow. New and old friends, old and new music. The life of a musician.

I’m on the slow train, high in the mountains northwest of Tokyo, on a concert tour in Japan with my piano quartet, the Thunder Egg Consort. The quartet is named after Oregon’s state rock.

We made it through the double typhoon in Osaka, and last night there was an earthquake (5.9) that woke us up from our deep sleep. 2 couples, 4 kids, 2 grandparents.

It’s at this point in my life that I don’t really want to leave Oregon for tours unless it means something special, beyond the concerts and rehearsals. It has to make a lasting imprint on my life, my children’s lives. It’s like I have a devoted notebook, each page with a stamp of a particular adventure, dinner, cultural surprise, that I can page through, touch, feel and smell.

When I was younger, I hit the pavement hard, first as a child, practicing incessantly, competing nationally, then internationally, and finally making it to the Curtis Institute of Music at age 18. Curtis is an elite, tuition-free music school in Philadelphia, considered to be one of the best in the world.

Then came years of building my career, long periods on the road, finding management, recording CD’s, moving to Germany and back to Oregon. Concerts night after night.

But now, as a middle-aged, menopausal woman, my desires for a career have changed. Don’t get me wrong – I’m still a sucker for the hot stage lights, the hard work, the payoff of a concert deeply felt, the applause. But that’s just not enough anymore. Now I need to know what I can pass along from these experiences to my kids, how this can strengthen and vary the interwoven fabric that we are creating together, tapestries that they will hold forever and pass on to their own families.

The squeaky train cuts through the rice fields, stacked in irregular shapes against the rising mountains, covered in a thick, moist green, the clouds lazily hanging here and there. Small towns dot the landscape, minuscule train stops, meandering rivers, marble cemeteries.

As the train snakes through this crazy-quilt of a landscape, I wonder what new square we will add from this trip to our family quilt of experience. Maybe it is the memory of our big hug, the four of us all together, during the earthquake. Perhaps it is the group brainstorm of ways to get to the train station during the typhoon, safe and with dry instruments (and our good humor and long card games when train after train was cancelled). Or possibly the confidence we have in our teenagers, age 14 and 16, leaving them alone in the evenings, knowing they can navigate large cities by themselves, finding dinner and making it back to the hotel while we are away at a concert.

In one hour, we have a 15 minute train change – the plan is to grab a quick bowl of ramen before hopping on the fast train – the bullet train – to Sendai, where our next stage awaits, where the young quartet that our quartet has birthed will have their own expedition together, creating new memories, learning to be brave and adventurous in a new city, while their parents don their suits and dresses, paying homage to the composers of the past and present.