The Piano Lesson

We were planning to see August Wilson's "Piano Lesson" recently, and it started up a lot of memories of heirlooms and land, which is what the plot turns on, to wit, whether to sell off the old family piano redolent with memories and buy land to be able to farm as something better than a sharecropper farming a landlord's property.  My thoughts turned to my wife's family's land, first purchased in 1735 and added to later on, and to the furnishings of the main house which was burned down in 1923 and the much less grand original house which waa on the other side of the road and thus spared the flames.  It ended up being the retirement home of my former wif's parents and so we visited a lot, a place therefore where my children spent lots of time and which I sort of thought of as the"homestead."  It was filled with eighteenth century furniture far finer than the nineteenth century stuff that went up in flames because in the nineteenth century the family members who occupied the "big house" across the street disdained such old stuff and wanted up to date Victorian furniture.  Years went by and eventually the house, the extensive land and the furniture ended up as an inheritance from my wife to one of my daughters, and arrangement made a decade or so ago.  My ex-wife kind of forced her daughter to assume some of the cost of buying it all from the estate, and so there it was after her mother died, an unwanted inheritance, a kind of museum of antique furniture in a house with very small if indeed picturesque rooms.  For decades everyone had tiptoed around the fact that no one really wanted to live there, it was too remote, and too uncomfortable.  Trouble was it was historic, it was family, it was oh, all those compelling and impossible things people murmur while thinking at the same time "thank god, this is not mine."  My daughter tried it for a year or so, until her husband said "this is like living in a museum, i want to be able to put my feet up on things."  And she cut the Gordian knot, as it were.  She put most of the acreage into conservation thus ensuring the town that some hideous developer would not put up a cute little village; she took the furniture to an auction house and it was sold off; and she moved to the city.  What courage she displayed!  Her grandmother did not have it, her mother did not have it. You know the phrase slave to tradition?  Well, she would have none of it.  Brave woman!  I decided not to go to the theater; I had already seen the drama played out over a decade.