One day The 747, the youngest of our five grandsons, told my wife how much he loves the game table on which he and she enjoy working jigsaw puzzles. It is relatively new and cleverly made, with drop-leaf sides and internal storage for the four wooden folding chairs that go with it. It had belonged to my wife’s mother, initially passed to a sister, then came to us.

“Put your name on it,” Honey told her grandson. “After I die, it’s yours.”

That’s the way it works in our family. In yours, too, probably. You actually don’t have to take a Sharpie and write your name on the underside of a rocking chair or heirloom serving platter, but if it turns out someone else in the family wants that thing, too, it gives weight to your claim of inheritance.

Many years ago, the last time we saw my Aunt Lillian alive, she gave us a schefflera tree, a bushy dwarf indoor plant whose primary attribute is that it’s hard to kill. (We tried.)

“Aint Lil” gave it to us because many years before we had given it to her. I would like to think she gave it back out of love and appreciation, but it may have been for revenge. Revenge seemed more likely to me every time I had to lug that bush in its heavy pot outside on the porch in the spring and bring it back inside the house every fall.

It wasn’t to give it more sunlight that we took it outdoors for the summer. Heaven forbid we’d do anything to make it grow larger. The reason was that over the winter it would be infested with white flies. Outside the ants would clean it up by eating them.

Any good jewelry in the family is passed down among the women. A ring or necklace isn’t something you can write your name on, so it helps if now and then over the years the claimant happens to mention at family gatherings that the lovely brooch Grandma’s wearing today was promised to her. Should Grandma forget or change her mind and leave it to someone else in her will, though, you’re screwed. Worse, hard feelings may linger for years.

Moving on to bigger things, who will get the Miller farm is already decided and taken care of by the simple expedient of adding our children’s names to the deed. What they do with it after myself and my two sisters are dead will be their problem.

Now, what becomes of the three houses on the farm, each in its own separately deeded parcel, is a different problem, and one which I hope will be handled amicably in the Miller Way. The Miller Way is essentially the same solution as described above with the drop-leaf puzzle table: whichever grandsons want and are able to live in the houses get them, with the unwritten codicil that they have to help take care of the farm and us old people who may still be around. The others get money or something else of not necessarily equal value. In that manner the farm has remained more or less intact and in the family since 1858.

Inheriting land and buildings is not always a boon. It takes money and a lot of work to keep up a property, and there is the moral obligation to hold it in the family that tethers the owner(s). Hopefully they’ll like being tied to the farm, as I do.

In my Great-great-grandfather Benjamin Miller’s will he spelled out details such as who got the household furniture, the better carriage and the good horse. Today we all have so many possessions that getting rid of them is the problem. (Hence the popularity of estate and yard sales.) When Honey’s mom died and close relatives had taken what household possessions they wanted, her sister Maria ordered every family member to pick out more three items and take them away.

As for the schefflera tree, this spring Honey suggested and I agreed that we had fulfilled any obligation to Aint Lil. We put it in our yard sale, and it has a new home in Chester with son Worshrag’s in-laws. I’ll suggest to Mr. Angles that he save his back and use a dolly to take it outside to cure the white fly infestation next spring.