This weekend was the quarterly Bulky Item Recycling event at the local landfill and I gritted my teeth and donated this chair and the sewing table. We had them in our yard sale last month but they didn’t sell. Go figure.
I bought the chair in about 1975 at a Salvation Army store in San Jose. The upholstery was fully intact at that time. I think it cost $15 and they delivered because I didn’t have any way to get it home. I loved the shape and the carved wood arms and feet. I did not like the color but, in those days, I was quite capable of doing the reupholstering myself. We put it upstairs in the master bedroom and I spent many an afternoon happily reading, knitting, doing needlepoint and, later, counted cross stitch. Somehow the reupholstery job didn’t happen.
When we moved back east, the chair went with us. I don’t remember where it lived when we were in New Jersey, but when we moved to Florida I covered it with a couple of flowered sheets to match the bedding in the guest room and it looked pretty good. When we moved back to California, the sheets survived the move without any disturbance and, in our current house, it has spent time in the guest room and, for the past several years, in our living room. It has been a good friend for almost 35 years now but, once I made the decision to sell get rid of it, it wasn’t too hard to say goodbye. The husband didn’t even ask me to help load it into the truck. He probably thought I might change my mind. My new knitting chair is the wooden rocker that my co-workers at the Court gave me when I retired. It’s a little hard on the rear, but I have plans to make some cushions for it.
The sewing table doesn’t really have any sentimental memories. I bought it with a Singer Slant machine at a rural yard sale, maybe 10 years ago. I thought it was very clever, the way the front of the cabinet pulled out to reveal the chair. In real life though, it was difficult to pull out and the seat was uncomfortably hard. The sewing machine has some mechanical problems and is sitting in the back of my closet waiting for repairs. It has a lot of cams with it and could possibly be a good machine if I ever get it to work. Not that I really need another machine….
So that’s two large items out the door on our way to getting organized. My family will be happy to hear this.
Until a few days ago, June had been rather gloomy. But yesterday it was 100 and the prediction for today was 101. However, the good old fog started through the Castroville Gap and we topped out at 92 in the late morning.
