Today’s find: Rocker

A rocking chair can’t speak. Any reasonable person knows this is true.

And yet, I heard a chair calling my name yesterday. This chair: a handmade white-oak creaker, once vilified by my father … but now beloved by my mother. A chair of character … and of characters, the repository of much family lore.

You should have seen how Mom’s face lit up when she learned the chair would “stay in the family” after Day 2 of the garage / estate sale we held yesterday. She doesn’t have room for it in her new place – the rocking chair, or a lot of the furniture and housewares she owns. So we’re trying to help her move on from much of her story-full stuff collected over a lifetime.

At first, my brothers and I thought that would mean letting the rocking chair go to another family in yesterday’s sale. Only then we started recalling its provenance: how Grandpa Ambrose had rescued the chair from the estate of a previous generation; how he’d sort-of repaired it; and how Dad had initially reviled it as “junk” – pointing to the still-visible crack-and-hole-and-screw at the base of one arm.

That scene played out about 58 years ago, but we all remembered it like it was yesterday. And we remember too how the rocking chair then became a cherished part of the family room décor, creaking and cracking and soothing the spirit of many an occupant through the decades.

The more we talked – my brothers and I – the more I realized I wasn’t quite ready to let the chair go. Thing is, we don’t have room for it either. Our place is already quite full of furniture and housewares. But I think we’ll manage to find a place for its burnished belovedness somewhere.

We’ll find a place for it, and then each time we rock and sway, no doubt we’ll join with St. Paul in saying…

We give thanks to God always for all of you, remembering you in our prayers, unceasingly calling to mind your work of faith and labor of love and endurance in hope of our Lord Jesus Christ…

Let us pause now…to recall that we are in the presence of the Holy & Merciful One.

IHS