The dresser

This is a strange stage in our lives. We went up to my mother's flat today to meet a valuer who was looking at her stuff and advising what it might make at auction. In most cases, as we knew, not very much. You don't get a lot for second-hand furniture and ornaments.
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This dresser is perhaps the most valuable item. I wish we could keep it but it's quite large and we have nowhere for it in our house. (Anyway, Mr Life doesn't like it. But I could probably persuade him... anyway, we don't have a space for it unless we got rid of the piano, which Shostakovich is currently making me think might not be a bad idea. Gosh, my current piece of music is hard.)
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The dresser isn't a family heirloom. My parents bought it with the flat, 21 years ago. But it's quite old. It's an eighteenth century piece but the valuer thought that the top bit had been replaced and was perhaps nineteenth century. It all looks the same age to me, but I assume he knows what he's talking about. Open shelves like that get broken when dressers are dragged about, evidently, and have to be replaced.
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I just like it because it's old. I like to speculate about where it's been, what it's seen (well, ok, not seen exactly, but what scenes it's sat in the middle of) and the variety of things that have sat on its shelves and been tucked away in its cupboards. It would be even more interesting if there were any way of finding any of this out, of course, but there's not.
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It's rather depressing to consider that it's probably got another few centuries in it, while we... . The previous owners of the house lived there for twenty years or so also, but I've no idea where they got the dresser. My parents' ownership of it has been quite brief in terms of its existence.
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The valuer said that it's English and provincial. I imagine it sitting in some farmhouse kitchen in Derbyshire or somewhere, its cupboards filled with pots and pans, and with plates propped up on the shelves between meals of ... I don't know ... soups and stews or whatever farmers ate in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.
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I'm quite tempted to slip a note in one of the drawers telling its new owners where it's been for the last forty years. It would be good if they then added to the note so that in another couple of hundred years, when we're all completely forgotten, the dresser would have its own little, partial, history.
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Yup. Feeling really cheerful tonight... .