Furniture

Since Petfinder's not cooperating today, here's a random post for those who may want something to read. This was suggested by one of the "Internet holidays" listed on Messy Mimi's blog: See if you can remember where all your furniture came from, and all of the damage that's been done to it. 

I don't have a great deal of furniture. 

During my early childhood Mother inherited a lot of beautiful antique furniture, including things brought over from England in the seventeenth century and things made by an ancestor in the nineteenth century. The collection included silverware and three little chests of silver and gold and real gemstone jewelry. Within two years and two moves across the country we'd lost all of it. One particularly loved heirloom had been sold to a cousin and his bride for $25; outside the family it would have been worth more like $1000. When we came home to a house with hardly any furniture in it, Mother dared to hope that the cousin might be willing to sell the precisely hand-carved piece back for $30. No such luck. They'd had a fire that had broken out right beside it. The house and the cheap tacky furniture had been saved, but the heirloom was gone.

After that we did have one really good handmade piece, a rocking chair my grandfather had made--just for fun, but he'd done a good job on it. We had a cheap aluminum folding table that had survived a lot of moving around, some of the straw-bottomed straight-backed kitchen chairs that were ubiquitous in the mid-twentieth century, a pair of bunk beds handed down from some cousins and a series of tacky secondhand sofas that were always replaced after mice got in and nested in them. Families with young children don't need expensive furniture anyway, I thought as I grew up and learned a bit about the subject.

As we children grew up some new things were brought into the house that might have been classified as furniture, or perhaps as tools. There was a hand-cranked grain grinder mounted on a mismatched kitchen chair. There were washing and drying machines. There was an antique wooden wheelchair that I never had to use, that looked wonderfully uncomfortable. There were a lot of crutches and other adaptive devices left behind by Mother's patients. There were hand carts and a hand-pushed plough. Upgrading the furniture was nobody's priority. As long as the junk held up, we were cool with it. A rather pretty antique china closet did move into the kitchen for some years, but the look of the whole house proclaimed that nobody in my family was attached to having nice furniture or decor.

In my twenties, though, I had some ideas of my own about what I wanted in my office and bedroom. I am shorter than the "average" 5'10" man for which standard furniture is designed, and wanted my furniture to fit me. So I built it. A sheet of plywood a little wider than my sleeping bag, put over a bed frame, became a nice low firm bed with shelves. Another piece of plywood laid across two chipboard storage units became my big office desk. Another piece laid across some sturdy plastic crates became my bedroom desk. I tried building a wardrobe, too, but had less success with that; some of the wood is still out in the woodshed--I never could bear to chop it up and burn it. And I bought some nice tall bookshelves that were made of heavy-duty plastic but they did match the color of the walls.

When Mother bought the big house on "Snob Hill" to retire to, and my sister and I took what we needed to set up our own homes, we stripped the Cat Sanctuary to its floorboards. For some years nobody really lived there, and whoever stayed there could put a sleeping bag on the floor and write on a suitcase. Mother took the rocking chair and china cupboard with her. A working part of the grain grinder had broken, anyway, Mother said. The hand-cranked washing machine, my Sweet Baby James, was still here but useless, as clothes couldn't be dried without electricity any more. My sister took the electric washing and drying machines. Nobody was attached to anything and there was no ill feeling about the attrition of furniture, the gradual change of the house from a family nest to a storage barn.

My husband's taste in furniture in our little house in the city was about as unpretentious as mine. He did have a good matched pair of front-room storage units. He had a bed that looked decent, but the mattress was old and saggy; he and I slept on a quilt on the floor. (Many people in India used to believe that sitting and sleeping on the floor is good for the spine. My husband's grandmother was one of those people. J.I. Rodale said they were right, and I've come to agree with them too.) Possibly the most valuable piece of furniture in the house was the hospital-type bed neither of us wanted to look at, much less sleep on. 

When I lost that house the moving men automatically loaded most of the furniture into their truck. I insisted on leaving the hospital bed behind; somebody else was sure to need it before I did. I got the dining table and chairs, the big storage units, the two Souder (particle-board) desks, the nightstand, the chest of drawers, out of our house, delivered to Mother's big new house. I needed money. Mother bought the desks and storage units. Friends bought the dining table and chairs, the nightstand, and the chest of drawers. 

Back to the Cat Sanctuary came the camp cot my stepson had slept on as a child, the plastic shelves, and a window fan. Three beds were still in the house, and four kitchen chairs and a table, and my desks. Friends donated a couple of cat cages. That was all I really needed. Most of what I'd brought back from the city was books and yarn. A friend who has a real talent for interior decorating walked in and screamed, "You're living like homeless people here!" Her fingers twitched visibly, longing to remake the house from its foundations up. I didn't let her into the house again.

Mother bequeathed her furniture to my sister and friends to help them open a secondhand store. Mostly I don't mind. Sometimes I think wistfully about Mother's books, several of which were new acquisitions I would have liked to read, and then I remind myself that I need to get back to a physical store and sell a couple hundred real books to make room on the shelves for new books I want to acquire. 

Sometimes I think wistfully about the treasures my parents lost when they tried moving everything across the country instead of leaving it in storage. I don't really want the role of curating very valuable heirlooms, but I think someone ought to have done it. At least the big Bible with all the great-grand-aunts and -uncles listed in it, I think, ought to have been kept. The sari family friends had given for my wedding when I was three years old: my husband didn't like fuss and display, and as he was divorced we were hardly entitled to a showy wedding, but since I did marry an Indian it would've been nice to have celebrated the occasion in a sari. The silverware...I don't even remember what Mother's family's silverware pattern looked like. I've used stainless steel flatware all my life and liked it, but I was meant to have inherited silverware in a distinctive family pattern. I don't really want a big heavy headboard for a double-wide bed, don't think it even looks decent for a single person to be actually using a two-person bed, but it would have been nice to be able to show off the headboard an ancestor wrought.

Then I think that, whatever more distant ancestors may have been, my parents were unpretentious people and did not bring up pretentious children. I wouldn't want to live in a museum. I'd rather live in a quirky old house where the furniture I use has been custom-made, if only from cheap junk, to fit me. I despise the idea of trying to make virtue from necessity, but the fact is that I'd rather have furniture that will be easy to replace if a sick animal wants to spend its last hours on it.

Computers have accumulated over the last twenty years. I'm thinking about building a new desk, the width of a room, to accommodate them.