It was the best of times - it was the worst of times. It was December 2010. We were doing a major remodel of our congregation's meeting place. As in gut the whole place, completely redo almost everything and make it nice and new and beautiful again. Wonderful! Except for the rain. And the wind. Let's not forget the cold. I had just been laid off, so I was at the construction site just about every day for a month. If I wasn't cleaning up or recycling copper wire or working in the kitchen, I was helping my husband's crew with the new video/sound/alarm system. When it was done, I was done in.
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| My friends holding down the kitchen, literally, from the storms of December 2010 |
So begins the story of the lost chair. There was a set of chairs that had been in the baby changing/mother's room. They had been nice back in the day, but their day had come and they were not going back in after the remodel. We used them in the make-shift kitchen during the build and we kept mentioning how comfy they were. When we started tearing down the kitchen, I took one home, saving it from the trash heap with the full intention of going back for the other one. That never happened. Like I said, when it was done I was done in and never went back for the second chair. The twin chairs that had witnessed countless pregnancies and bouts of morning sickness and newborns and who knows what else were now just sad little single chairs. The twins were separated from births and each other!
The Asian themed chair looked really out of place on our back porch and it never fit in with the other patio furniture. Not that ours are so great - our "set" is one that our neighbors put out for Dump Days and the eating table is one we rolled home from another trash heap a few blocks away. Are you noticing a pattern here? We don't buy stuff, we just acquire stuff. But the acquired now-separated twin sister chair just looked really sad and became the chair Molly sat in when she wanted to stare in the office and make us feel guilty.
Thursday I dropped off some friends from our congregation at Little Moldova, an apartment that lives up to our nickname for it. No one there throws anything out, they just put it by the dumpster, (which is where we got our round wicker patio table, now that I think of it). Today I looked and there it was! The Twin! The missing Twin Sister Chair! I threw that thing in the back of my car and raced home to reunite the girls. I must say, our dog hair-covered one looked worse than the paint-splattered one from Little Moldova. But with some washing and scrubbing and scraping, we have a cleaned up matching set. I put them on the front porch with all my jade plants and they look great. All is right in the world. When my husband came home, he was so tired he walked right by them, but when I sent him back out to the porch he yelled "You FOUND it, where did you FIND it?" Did he really need to ask? I found it where we get all our patio furniture - in the trash heap.
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| Reunited... |
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| ...and it feels so good! |
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| The saved from certain death patio furniture |
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| She lost her "Make Them Feel Guilty Chair." |
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| She gets over stuff really fast. |
