Tuning the same piano for thirty years

I drove out to the Gilford house this morning, same spinet I've been tuning since before their daughter was born. She's nineteen now and plays Chopin at me while I work — I've heard her go from clumsy scales to actual music, and the piano has aged the opposite direction, which feels fair somehow. The soundboard has a crack that's been there for fifteen years and I keep telling them it's cosmetic, and they keep not replacing the piano because of it. There's something almost religious about being the only one who knows the instrument's whole history — every stubborn pin, every note that drifts s