For twenty years before grandma was born
my great-grandfather played the violin.
“It was a Stradivarius.” She claims, 
though I wonder if she is mistaken. 

He played for dances in Nelson County 
then stopped when his daughters came along
because he did not allow them to dance –
it can lead to drinking, and other sins. 

But Friday nights he still had a small band
with two friends on their guitar and banjo.  
The three of them walked up a hill 
at the border of his property’s vast acreage

to perform each week for the farmhands 
who worked for him and lived there in shacks.
“After I’m gone, you find that violin
under the floorboards in the attic.”

She once instructed me on the phone 
from her house in Lynchburg, forty miles south 
of great-granddad’s land, what he passed on 
having been sold to pay for her long-term care. 

“I know it must be worth a lot.” She said.
A year later, now in a nursing home,
calling me again to ask if I received 
the package a friend sent in the mail,

she says the residents were entertained 
by a bluegrass trio. “They played some hymns 
and I sang along.” She tells me. I let her know
I have the family treasure now –

when I put it to my ear, I hear breeze 
whisper through fields of alfalfa, 
flutter among poplars in a hilltop grove, 
and the faint strain of “Abide With Me.”