A century of comfort

The rocking chair, in its earliest-known place, belonged to my father's best friend's mother.

My father was born in 1923. He remembered the rocker in his friend Layton Jury's house, where Dad spent a lot of his time, his mother being too young and busy to keep up with him. Dad rocked on Mrs. Jury's rocker until he fell over backwards on it.

Dad never said what color the rocker originally was. When Layton's mother died, my father went to the estate auction and bought the chair. He repainted and upholstered it, black with a green, gold, black, and white plaid, and presented it to me as a gift a few months before my daughter was born. He wanted me to have a comfortable chair in which to rock my baby.

Somewhere around 1997, I wirebrushed the whole chair, repainted it a dark blue, and reupholstered it in a floral fabric, and made a matching footstool for it.

A couple weeks ago, I was thinking that I needed to wirebrush, prime, and repaint the woven body of the rocker -- this dry air here makes things look shabby quickly. I hadn't decided on a color for it, though. Maybe a deep green, or a lighter blue?

The question was answered this morning ... I heard Alex cry out in horror, went running out to the kitchen to see Alex staring at the broken runner of the rocker. It just gave way, probably a crack that was there when Dad bought the thing.

Can it be fixed? I don't know. The other runner could be removed, and it could still be a chair. So many memories, so many years. If the chair can't be fixed, it will nevertheless, not be forgotten.