1850

Do review these stills from a tremendously important estate sale held in Memphis over the weekend. It is a treat to glimpse this home, which sits cloaked behind a high fence and a large swathe of property diagonal to our University Club in our Central Gardens, where there is nary a tall building to peep it from. In general though, I find such events to be confusing and tragic. I know a handful of these living descendants, and I understand that their lives have run a separate course--their comforts are not in the old profusions (Lord knows why). People do not live in state anymore, do not want to employ staffs, pay fat tariffs. This (among other things...) is why so many of the fine old American houses have been demolished or turned museum. I can't lay claim to this sort of thing. My ancestors were poor and feckless, but what objects of theirs I do have, I hold fast to. And I imagine, if I possessed in my line a WHOLE house full of things purchased and arranged just so by my people, I would bar it from being disbanded as best I could (I know...money, means, etc.). If I remember correctly (and do correct me), Pillow's family seat was burned down before her mother was born. But if Pillow and Mama Pillow could, I think they would have it still. I'm being unjustly critical (with little grounding in reality, sums and figures). But I know, having grown up in Central Gardens, that properties like these see uncertain and unhappy fates once let loose. If there are potential buyers, they'll surely bristle at the price. It will sit empty for a stretch. It will maybe be bought and sold, bought and sold by those who hardly live in it, certainly not for generation after generation, as before. It lies right on the train track border between ours and a far dodgier section of town. The address is a bit tarnished now, the pocket of land isolating, and in dicey Memphis, worrisome. And so it goes; America is too fast for History.

Whatever happens, the kitchen will be lost. Ooooof.