Today, I had my last breakfast at the beautiful wooden trestle table, with an old barn door for a top, that a neighbor made and gave us 21 years ago, shortly after we bought a house in the sweet southern Vermont town to which we are now moving wholesale. We are cleaning out our New York apartment, our home for the last 30 plus years, and are becoming full-fledged (voters, driver’s licenses, residential taxes, etc.) Vermonters.

We’re giving the table away to make room for a mid-century (20^th), cherry table that held place of honor in the dining room of the suburban Boston home in which I grew up. Well, not exactly place of honor. Actually it was consigned to an unprepossessing room adjacent to our kitchen. Still, it brings back memories, which, in keeping with the unremarkable room, are not particularly roseate ones, of special and rare occasions – Thanksgiving dinners and dinners with relatives – maybe one and the same. Maybe a Passover, but I doubt it. Those were at my grandparents’ house in the predominantly Jewish precincts of Boston. Mostly, the room was unused. There was a line of smallish windows two feet above eye level on one side, one open side gave onto the living room, a third was covered in curtains in, what would have been considered at the time, a bold and modern pattern. (A picture of them that I discovered recently – in medio motu –  makes them appear drab and dated.)

I am afraid that I have allowed sentimentality to get the better of my good judgement. The trestle table fits perfectly – aesthetically and otherwise – in our Vermont home. The (ersatz?) Danish modern, I fear not. (I hold out hope that I will be pleasantly surprised when the moving van arrives with it late next week.)

Sentimentality is a danger that hovers over and exponentially augments the emotional exertion of making such a move. The most difficult task, of course, is to purge three-quarters or more of one’s life – the books, the papers, the clothes, the photos, the superannuated technology, the knick-knacks, the camping and sports equipment, the paper clips, and the picture hooks – that one has accumulated over a lifetime. Lest you haven’t undertaken such a task recently, that includes the Blackberries, the old printers, the flip phones, the (broken) xc skis from one’s glory days as a high school ski champ, the glitter, glue and sequins (ordered from some online party store) for our son’s fourth birthday party activity, a hula hoop (from where?), school binders, one for each subject for 12 years of said erstwhile four-year-old’s primary and secondary education, the hoses and pumps for the long-ago abandoned fish tank, the business suits, the padded shoulders, my mother’s winter dress-up coat with moth-eaten fur collar and trim.

My desire to hold onto the dining table has something to do with holding onto whatever is home to me, I suppose. The table, like Proust’s madeleine, certainly reminds me of the entirety of the 1950s modern ranch house that my father and grandfather built and in which I lived from birth until I left for college, and for good. In this category, there’s also the Persian (Turkish?) rug that was my grandparents’ that I’ve carried with me since college, to every apartment for the past 50 years of my adult life – and to this home in Vermont.

And then there’s the piano, which deserves, and indeed has gotten, a substantial role in a novel. (Mine, to be published in the fall of 2027. See earlier blogs.) The large upright, a Haddorff (company no longer exists) was built in Rockford, Illinois in 1920. My grandparents bought it new (probably), in Boston, and it was the piano my mother grew up playing. She was an accomplished pianist when she was young – she and a friend were the sole performers at their Girls’ Latin High School 1937 class day ceremony. They played a Chopin Polonaise arranged for four hands, according to their class day program I recently found in the Girls’ Latin Archives at Radcliffe’s Schlesinger Institute. I don’t know how many times the piano moved from my mother’s early childhood home, in Brighton, Ma., before it reached the suburban home I grew up in. From there, though, it was moved at least a dozen times – first to a Cambridge apartment my sister lived in after college, back to the suburban homestead, then to my first Boston apartment out of college in Jamaica Plain, then back to the homestead, then to Hamilton, Ipswich, and then Danvers, Ma., then back to another Cambridge apt., then Somerville (two different apartments), then DC, then my apartment on the fourth floor of a New York city brownstone, then 344 West 72^nd, the address from which we are now moving.

Despite what it’s been through, it’s a terrific instrument. It has produced sound easily as fine as the Baldwin grand, also an heirloom, that is already in our Vermont home and taking precedence over the Haddorff. The exacting German who tuned for Carnegie and learned his trade from his father back in the old country reliably raved about the quality of the Haddorff  when he came to minister to it and christened it as good as many grands.

I’m giving it away. It feels like I’m giving away a living being. By any sensible standard, there is no room for it in our Vermont home. If I were living alone, I might, ill-advisedly, jam it in anyway.

A young family will take it. The parents are amateur musicians. They will use it. And, as well as can be expected with two toddlers in the house, they will take good care of it.

They’re coming next Wednesday to take it away. I may cry.