Generation to generation

A friend wrote yesterday that as he and his wife stood in the guest room of their daughter’s new home looking at the furniture from their families, stored for many years, they said to each other, “This has been a long time coming, but it was worth waiting.”

Another friend recently moved from overseas asked me where we bought our furniture and it brought me up short. Bought? Very little was ever bought – a recliner, mattresses, a few small pieces. No, my furniture is generational, and I love it.

Everyone takes naps on Lorena’s sofa, now in its third generation and who knows how many different upholstery colors. Somewhere I have a faded newspaper picture of my parents and my grandparents on that sofa at their 50th and 25th wedding anniversaries – August, 1953. Lorena’s high poster bed lives at the Dragon’s house, along with her folding desk. Her glass bookcase is upstairs in the red room.

Lewis’ desk is mine, but it detoured through my father’s hands for about 50 years. When I sit down, I feel the weight of the gentlemen who did serious work at that desk, and it sobers me at times. Both of their pictures look at me from under the glass top. Fitting reminders.

In the front hall is a washstand, one of six that Bernice lovingly saved for her six sons. Upstairs we use Bernice and Alvin’s dressers every single day. An iron bedstead in the next room came from her childhood home. Down the hall, maple bed frames take me back to my childhood when Clarence Sr. bought them for my room so he’d have a decent place to sleep when he came visiting from Atlanta. They were used hard, but a refinishing job and new mattresses brought them back to life again.

Lois’ chairs are often my spots for casual reading. The command post chair sat in her living room at the end of her life, comfortable and strategic beside her phone. From that chair she listened to the problems of a whole town and prayed for the world. Her Board reward rocker elegances my study. Out in the family room Russell’s chair is a favorite with the grands because it’s big enough for three kids. Jane’s rocker lives at the Dreamer’s house and has rocked her little ones.

The kitchen chairs remind me of our first apartment, a steal at $15 bucks including the maple table. The table lives with the Driver right now, but I have claim to it for my old age. My dining table belonged to Betty and Alice and fed multitudes before I got it. It continues to feed the world, opening to five wide leaves. The china cupboard came with our first house, for peanuts. The buffet that matches it lives with the Dreamer because I have Lois’ buffet. I remember her saving her honoraria from speaking engagements for years until the day came when she had enough to buy it. It’s not spectacular, but it holds meaning.

All these things are temporal. There will come a day when I give them away, or sell them, or they fall apart. But until then, instead of ghosts around the house, I have the memories of friends and family who are gone, but who left little traces of themselves behind.

The memories are rich and they continue to be made. I watch Joy-Boy climb up the side of Russell’s chair and tumble into it. He turns and grins at me and then proceeds to strip off his shoes and socks, tossing them to the floor. He laughs again, gives me a look, climbs over the other side of the chair and slowly drops himself down to the floor.

Not even once do I think to say, “Careful of the furniture, Jon.”