There comes a time in life when we have to let go of something to make room for what’s next. That time for me has come and what I am letting go of are some of the things I have collected over the last (gasp) twenty or so years. Things that made wherever I was living my home. I have never had lots of “nice” things, just a collection of stuff. Found, given, bought at a yard sale, no matter how it came to me it seems that all of my stuff has a story. One of my favorite stories is of my kitchen table and chairs.
I get that few people see the charm of this set the way I do. When I was living in my first apartment my mom was driving out of her neighborhood and spotted this table on the side of the road left out for the trash man. She loaded into her car and brought it to me. It’s a great table with a leaf that folds out in this really simply but fancy way. I refinished it myself. I still didn’t have any chairs but I was getting closer to being able to eat like a grown-up.
Not long after I got the table Jim’s father passed away. When they were selling his house, Jim mentioned that I was setting up my first home and needed many things. So I inherited six chairs from my grandfather, who had taught me to cook. When I think of him I always think of food, family meals, and learning to add a dash of this and a pinch of that until it was just they way you thought it should be. How fitting I would sit at my table and enjoy meals on chairs that came from him. I learned that he had bought the chairs at auction from the King Cotton Hotel just before they tore it down. That was in 1971, just a few years before my mom met Jim and we all became a family.
Coincidentally my mom had taken my brother and I downtown to watch them implode the King Cotton Hotel. I was six or seven years old then and I remember that building coming down. It probably launched a lifelong fascination with building demolition. The irony that I am, by profession, someone that tries to save old buildings from demolition is not lost on me. So my chairs and table have a great history. Letting them go is tough. But I let them go with the knowledge that I am making room for new memories not yet imagined.
The King Cotton Hotel when my chair populated the dining room.
I might be back there in the crowd.
