Favorite chairs hold deep-seated memories

When it comes to pieces of furniture that have been in families for generations, it’s easy to form deep-seated memories. Particularly when you have an heirloom chair.

Think about it. Photo albums show photos of grandmother in her favorite chair, and in the timeline of a family captured in the photographs on each page the chair appears and reappears.

You see yourself standing by that same chair in your 1977 prom photo, and with your first child. Grandmother poses in that chair year after year and you see the years take their toll.

I asked readers to share memories of favorite chairs or to share the stories behind the chairs in their homes. And I was happy with the response.

Sara De Ryan called to tell me about her grandmother’s chair. The ornately carved side chair is the only one like it I’ve ever seen. Two large faces are carved into the tall back of the chair.

De Ryan’s grandmother purchased the chair in the mid-1890s with her first pay as a schoolteacher.

“I don’t know what she saw in the chair,” De Ryan said. “But she always had it around.”

Ann Plichta has a thing for chairs. “I looked around at my ‘babies’ and knew I had to tell you about them,” she wrote.

Plichta’s favorites include a set of four Victorian chairs that she purchased in England in the 1970s.

“I have the chair my parents bought to rock me in( I wouldn’t sit still),” Plichta wrote.”I have the rocking chair that sat in front of the stove in my great-grandparents house in Tennessee.”

There are other characters in Plichta’s chair menagerie. “On my deck is a white wrought-iron ‘ice cream’ chair my dad fished out of the basement of a burned-out house in upstate New York in the 50s and I have a green brocade upholstered chair with a shield-shaped back and wooden arms and legs from my grandparents home, and in a box in the basement is a child’s rocker belonging to my dad that needs to be put together,” Plichta wrote. “I love my chairs.”

I’d still like to hear about your chair affair.

The one that got away

I just moved and the garage of my new house is piled with boxes that haven’t been taken into the house yet. But one thing isn’t there.

I’ve held onto a big kitchen cabinet, the kind that was built to go into roomy farmhouse kitchens before the Hoosier cabinet came along, for several years. I was determined to bring it into my new house and fill it with china and crystal. I could see it. No one was excited about moving such a big heavy piece, but I held firm. Until the eleventh hour.

Time and space were getting tight. Patience was wearing thin. And the cabinet still needed some work to get it ready to move into the house. So, I let it go. It’s in a friend’s garage now, on its way into her house on the Peone prairie. She’ll have that wonderful old cabinet in her house in no time. Oh, well. That’s how it goes.

What about you. Do you have a story about the one that got away? A piece that, although you loved it, just didn’t make the final cut?

Share your story with the rest of us.