Your Friday prompt for Stream of Consciousness Saturday is “to your left.” When you sit down to write your post, look to your left. What is the thing closest to you? Write about the memories that thing induces.
Oh my gosh, what a long line of memories these kitchen chairs bring up.
My laptop is sitting on a kitchen table bought more than 50 years ago by my parents. On my left is a chair from a set of four that never went with the table. There’s 50 odd years of memories in these.
My parents didn’t agree on much, especially when it came to decorating. We first lived in a house in a small town until I was 10 years old when my dad’s company transferred us to the Big City; Toronto. My parents looked for a house but couldn’t agree on one and rented an apartment until they could find a house.
The big dining room set barely fit into the dining room of our first apartment. To get to the back chairs you had to squeeze behind pushed in chairs or, as kids, just climb over the empty chairs. But they kept it because we were maybe going to buy a house.
In the next apartment they knew they were never going to buy a house and so would buy an smaller dining set. And so the Saturday morning search for a dining room set, followed by a fight and tears, became a weekly event.
Finally, they found some chairs they both really liked. Wherever they saw these chairs had a pedestal table on sale. It was fairly ugly but my mom would make tablecloths for it. They would use it until they found a nice dining room table.
My mom would go to Fabricland, buy extra wide fabric, and make round tablecloths for it. I bought her a round tablecloth in Morroco that she loved. She used it up until the end, stains and all.
They never bought a new dining room table.
My dad passed away from a heart attack just as my mom’s Multiple Sclerosis was getting bad. A few years later she met a farmer in the hospital and they got married. He was living with his parents so he fixed up an old house on his farm and my mom’s furniture was moved down to farm country.
This dining room set was by a bay window in their kitchen, always filled with plants and flowers. We still used the chairs but my mom was in wheelchair. We would have our meals together; meals were the highlight of her day.
My mom lived to be 80 years old; even with her MS. She had a terrible flu and got better. She fell out of her wheelchair and broke her hip and got better! But in the end her organs shut down.
Her husband stayed in the house so we weren’t going to take any furniture from him. But fate had more shit in store for us.
My husband was abusive and I tolerated it for way too long because he didn’t hit me. He constantly yelled and belittled me and finally threw me out because I couldn’t work hard enough. I did not go back. He re-mortgaged our home to buy me out and I bought my own house.
During that time, my mom’s husband passed away and we went to get her furniture. I almost threw up from the smell when I went in: the house was a hoarding nightmare. My sister and I took 2 trips with 2 vans trying to sort through my mom’s stuff.
I basically needed to start all over so I was happy to get this dining room set along with some furniture my dad had made.
I’ll take a photo even though I have a vinyl tablecloth on it. (I can hear my mom say, “How gauche!”) I do have a couple of cloth table cloths. But this post is about the chair on my left.
I’m a little sarcastic when I say; Thanks for the memories
The Friday Reminder and Prompt for #SoCS May 8, 2021 | (lindaghill.com)
monicle's chronicles 