Sunday, November 25, 2012

Tale of two chairs


Grandson sat on this little chair today to have a snack, as he has on occasions before. Years and years ago (when dinosaurs roamed the hills and plains of Scotland and woolly mammoths trumpeted at night and I was just a little girl) this chair sat with other identical chairs in the Sunday School room at our church. I and my contemporaries sat in them. When our children were small, the church replaced these chairs with stackable ones and sold the old ones off, this example to me. Our children then sat on it when they were little. (The other day, Son-in-Law 1, who is a slender person, sat in it. He fitted. I don't think I'll try. I might fit in but I'd be embarrassed if the fire brigade had to be summoned to extract me.)


This chair, on the other hand, used to belong to my maternal grandparents. I was given it when my granny died and my grandpa moved in with my parents in 1980. It sat in Granny's sitting room, which was only ever used if they had visitors. I have no idea where they got it. Maybe they bought it new from a shop when they got married in 1921. I'm fond of it. Grandson likes peeping through the bars and giggling.

(I apologise for his lack of trousers in these photos. We'd just got him up from his nap and hadn't yet completed his ensemble. He's wearing manly tights with his vest poppered underneath. You can get away with that when you're one.)

What's that sound, you ask? Well, it might be the sound of the bottom of a barrel being scraped. Only five more days of NaBloWhateveritscalled. I really must do something to report on. I did make macaroni cheese and shortbread yesterday but that doth not a blog post make. Not like chairs.

10 comments:

  1. Well, it would make a post if you gave us a shortbread picture to drool over, in a ladylike way, of course!

    We have a chair belonging to Peter's grandmother that I always sat in, facing her so she could see the only great grandchild that she was able to meet, sadly.

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  2. Chairs----A fascinating topic! The nuns used to regularly give us topics to write essays about where we had to speak [write] as the object or person in question, "My life as a Spider" for instance, or "A Day in the Life of a Chair." 'Twas no wonder we went around torturing ourselves by sticking our fingers in the hot melted wax of the convent candles, and that some desperate souls [among whom I was not counted, I hasten to add] practiced giving themselves hickeys-on the arm,[not the neck,] acrobatics was not on the curriculum....

    I'm cheering for you. Five to go. Dig deep, go out with a bang!

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  3. In my guest room I have the rocking chair that my grandmother bought for me when I was your grandson's age from the Hitchcock Chair Factory in Connecticut (we lived in Ohio at the time). And, yes, I would have to be rescued or cut out of it if I tried to sit in it today. So the only thing in it today is an old Steiff bunny rabbit that was also mine a bazillion, million years ago.

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  4. Chairs are fascinating.....Artifacts of all sorts and their lives are of interest. My mother's old Hans Christian Anderson from the 20s has so many short stories on the lives of cork screws and bottle necks....Or so I remember....I'll be sad (but understand) if you don't blog daily in December, but I think you're doing marvelously!

    Maybe I'll blog about chairs. If I can remember!

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  5. Genuine scottish shortbread!!! Make it again, take photos ...

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  6. He is growing up fast....and looks so cute in that chair. My ma has a lovely chair in her bedroom that she knows (how awful this sounds)we all want after she is no longer here....there are 4 of us..so she jokes that she should give it away to a friend now!

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  7. If you ate macaroni cheese WITH the shortbread, that would most definitely be a blog post in itself!

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  8. I agree with Lynley -- pictures of genuine scottish shortbread please. You could make the sacrifice for us and make another batch. You know...a terrible price to pay....

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  9. http://holdingmybreath-martha.blogspot.com/2012/07/grandfathers-handiwork-lives-on.html

    See my posting of the chair my grandfather made for me. My grandson has a good time with it now.

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  10. Do you remember those old wrap-around pinnys? The sort that had a back and two 3/4 fronts with ties that fed through a little hole and then tied up at the back? (For anyone really young, you see them in 1940s films!)
    As children, we used to tie my great-aunt, a sturdy soul who was never out of her pinny except to go to church or to sleep, to the back struts of her chair. She could not move. We used to leave her there for ages - the only rest the poor soul got!

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