The Chair Series, Part One

Self-portrait at home. Photo by Laura Edgerton.

I have carried around a thought for a while, the fact that so much life revolves around the objects that are a familiar part of one’s regular routine. This chair has seen different iterations of just being itself: a longstanding prior sentience in another family’s home, an inanimate witness to love and loss and arguments and floating pet hair and Thanksgiving dinners and football games and Christmas tree decorations and all of the random moments that comprise standard human interactions. Then there was our former house, where this chair and its companions lived next, a cozy home in the woods that held the nearly tangible relief of a separation from the rest of the world, a simple retreat away from unwanted communication and noise, a place that still enters my dreams at night and taunts me with the ghosts of the past. Throughout our years there, this chair had seemed to stand watch, a constant presence at one end of a large wooden table scarred by memories and time.

For the last several months, this chair has sat in our bedroom and watched the mundanity of everyday life as it naturally occurs. It has been a silent observer to daily repetitions of laundry and getting dressed and cleaning and taking baths; it has watched moments of intimacy and sleep, laughter and arguments, tears, puppy snuggles, the changing of weather and seasons and light patterns and moods and intentions. Since childhood, I have been fascinated by the possibility of whether a particular object is tied to the past and its former owners; I am interested in what its existence symbolizes when viewed as one’s companion to anxiety and sadness and marriage and parenting and the incessant worry that is sometimes threaded throughout it all.

So, I wonder, can a chair retain invisible elements of its past lives? Are there stories held within its wood and density and layers of chipped paint; are there old hurts that were buried there, before the chair came to us, secrets that were too terrible to ever articulate aloud to another human being? Is there a psychological link between those who once sat on a piece of furniture and the people in whose house that object now lives?

This chair is the same color as it has been for many years, a dark blue that is neither attractive nor ugly and which makes me feel nothing. I envision myself eventually sanding it down, maybe on a warm day in late spring, and painting it a very light gray color, something that reminds me of the sky before a storm. For now, its darkness contrasts well with the afternoon light; I watch for it every day; I yearn to see it.