Parallel Roads, Different Seasons

      Two black spray-painted orange crates, covered with saucer-sized day-glow flowers were the sum total of our furniture in 1970.
  We progressed from rented furniture to family cast-offs, from a U-Haul trailer to a U-Haul truck. Next came a collection of bookcases, dressers, and a smoke-damaged table all bought for the almost unreachable $200 at a used furniture store in Long Branch, New Jersey.

            As we traveled from Fort Benning to Fort Gordon to Fort Monmouth we finally graduated to a real moving van and finished up in 1971 at Fort Ord, California with just about enough furniture for an apartment, although our mattress remained on the floor for three years.

             Forty-three years later, the most recent marriage in the family has been our nephew, who returned from their honeymoon to a newly purchased house.  He and his wife have a couch that, unlike ours in the past, isn’t so ragged his new bride must quickly learn how to slipcover, and their end tables needn’t be transformed by the 1970’s technique of “antiquing” - that painting method that was the friend of battered furniture everywhere.  The young couple spent the months before the wedding opening their front door to discover a grandfather or aunt of the bride bearing a new television, an outdoor grill,  or perhaps a pair of lamps.  This seemingly endless parade of objects was driven by the fact that she was the first bride in the clan.

            Meanwhile, the groom channeled our side of the family’s gift for reclaiming castoffs and bringing new life to them. His shop area now sports two painstakingly painted red and black chairs that were to be tossed from a defunct factory. Next to the chairs is a workbench he fashioned from a slab of wood that had been propped by a dumpster at his company.  In their front hall is a side table carefully stripped and re-stained to reveal previously unknown wood inlays.

            Last fall, I joined in a tag sale in their neighborhood and sat alongside contributions pulled from my overflowing cellar, my main goal less to make money than to unload at least a modicum of this stuff onto someone else. I brought silver candle sticks, which were a small cube of the iceberg of silverplate tarnishing quietly in my basement. I had also trucked over pressback, hand-caned chairs that had circled our dining table for twenty years. I put price tags on crystal bowls and glassware that I could only have dreamed of forty years ago; years of acquisition were now followed by the need to thin my herd of belongings.

            While I stood in my nephew’s driveway thinking about departing with an empty car, he was on the next street scouting for likely treasures. I happily collected two bucks for the box of absolutely outdated video games just as he arrived with an entire cupola in his arms, triumphant in his bargaining skills.

            One Christmas in the 80s my mother-in-law had made matching gifts of oversized  stenciled pine rocking chairs, one to me and one to my sister-in-law.  Years later my rocking chair sat forlornly on a driveway with a price tag, while its twin rested safely twenty feet away in my nephew's living room, evidence of the two marriages’ diverging timelines.