Thursday, August 30, 2012

The Rest of the Rest of the Story...

My infatuation and love of this chair continued through our four-day, three-night vacation!  It was love at first sight and despite my withdrawal from it to go on our first planned family excursion to the beach, I had lots of time to think about it as I sat in my sun free tent.  Later that night I examined the chair in great detail, drew sketches of it and photographed it.  I was secretly scheming about making an offer to buy it.

I learned that the ottoman and chair were an unmatched set until slip covered.  I even studied the patched and torn slip cover, surely in time I could sew another to preserve its “shabby chic” look!  It had that “well-loved” appearance! Its comfort was also the subject of my study.  The back pillow was filled with down.  It truly had been an extraordinary chair in its day, and being well-sat-out, I considered the hours it took to get it “just right”, and being oversized, it fit me perfectly!

I began mentioning to my husband that I wanted to offer to purchase the chair, and just like any family vacation, the oxy-moron, “family vacation” played itself out.  I have long thought that our marriage was perfect as my husband does just enough travel on his job, and our girls are independent enough to give me time to miss them when they are gone.  Family vacations, like over-ripe fruit, can be a bit too much of a good thing!  And so The Vacation Chair became the contention that we all began to fight over!  Now I knew why the medicine cabinet wasn’t replaced with a modern mirror...a headache was now erupting and I would soon find this cabinet accommodating!

How bizarre of me, my family thought, to want to take home a tacky over-used chair! What would the owners think of such an offer, and worse yet would they consider me crazy, my family worried? Being a bit crazy isn’t foreign to me, so this argument didn’t effect me! Living four hours away, I didn’t think our upstanding reputation (what up-standing reputation?) in our small town would be ruined!  Where would we put it?  And why didn’t I just consider buying a new chair, though we couldn’t afford it? I made peace and zipped my lip, but after leaving the motel, I pined for The Vacation Chair.

I tried to reason with myself that I really didn’t need this Vacation Chair, which only made me want it worse than ever.  I did some soul searching trying to root out the psychological problem manifested by such a displaced attachment.  Was it my early vacation experiences in Grand Lake, Colorado, where my family would rent a cabin at Kickapoo Lodge every summer? Only now do I wonder about it’s name--was it really an Indian name or was it a literal translation for the sort of place that it was?

My mother would buy us salt water taffy to keep our jaws stuck together as our large family would bed down early each night in a rustic cabin of wall-to-wall beds, and we all had to keep quiet as my serious fisherman-father had to get up at the crack of dawn to go sit on the dock and begin his fishing marathon each day until the sun went down.  He did, after all, need some serious relaxation to compensate for being overworked the other fifty-one weeks of the year! It didn’t seem to matter that our teeth would rot from the sugar stuck to them, though we were mostly silenced, except for the sucking noises of chewing taffy and smacking our lips.  My mother was a brilliant woman, keeping us content, quiet and willing to go on family vacations—attached to the sweet dreams we all had of sticky salt water taffy!

Yes, these associations were all tied to the vacation chair and I continued to dream of vacationing at home, year round!  It was what I needed to relax and recover during a long term medical treatment. I knew that I could only be happy and cured if I had The Vacation Chair!

After getting home I combed Rutland, and then Poultney, and Granville, and then got on-line to look for chairs, taking in all chairs for sale in a three state region and then sent out pictures to my friends to see if they had friends wanting to sell any of their old chairs that resembled this Vacation Chair! I made a final appeal to my family for permission to make an offer on the original Vacation Chair.  After telling them what it would cost to buy a new chair and ottoman and then slip cover it, they began to see my reasoning…an old chair might be just the thing! Chairs are not cheap and we are!

I did contact the owners of the motel and they told me they would consider selling me the chair, but couldn’t do it until after the season was over.  I was temporarily content, and proceeded to sew as many pincushions as I could, with the idea of earning The Vacation Chair.  As luck and Maria Wulf’s Functional Art Show at Bedlam Farm’s Pig Barn Gallery would have it, my earnings would provide me with what I needed to make a solid offer on this chair. Yankees love to dicker and I was prepared!

The motel owners likely checked the cushions for stashed cash, like some treasure-hunter’s search  for cash hidden behind old pictures, as my offers grew larger with the dickering…Was I crazy? Most definitely—that was already a given!  I was crazily in-love with this chair!

At last I made an offer that I figured they couldn’t refuse, only to find out their reluctance wasn't to drive the price up, but rather that the chair had only been lent to them by a sister-in-law and when they asked for permission to sell the chair to me, the sister in law decided to use it in their newly bought cottage in Maine. Apparently it would have no furniture except this chair until moving there after retiring in a few years. I surmised after my lucrative offers, the sister-in-law hung onto it as a great retirement investment and imagined it worth growing if only invested a while longer?  So in the end I didn’t get the original Vacation Chair!

Determined to have a Vacation Chair, my search continued until one day, exhausted from shopping  and  physically hurting, I sat down in a chair to simply rest and found my Vacation Chair.  It was covered in a formal sort of brocade material that wouldn’t go with anything in my house but as my perpetual vacation had begun when I sat down, I asked for an inexpensive ottoman to prop up my weary feet. It was as strange as the chair, not overstuffed but a rattan one, but with a pillow on top, I had found what felt just right, just like Goldilocks!

 I imagined slip covering the unmatched set and I went home to clear a spot for it.  My family was delighted and likely relieved, thinking that I would get back to "normal" living and my obsession would be over!

I had an old homespun white bedspread that I temporarily used to covered the chair, but Zeldie, my started attacking and biting it as she did to other upholstered furniture.  We did note that she doesn't bite soft velour sorts of fabrics and so that eliminated the job of doing a slip cover.  My girls got me a soft plushy blanket to cover it, making it cat proof.

An old burgundy colored corduroy cushion was found in the basement to cover the top of the rattan ottoman tying it in, at least by color to the other accents in the room and soon visitors were commenting on the uniqueness of the ottoman and all said it shouldn't be covered. And that, my friends “is the rest of the rest story" of The Vacation Chair with its unmatched ottoman! 

It is a special chair with a special pillow to tell its story.  Maria had only a couple of pictures and my comment that my ideal vacation is "tacky" and she captured the dreams of my past, present and future vacations. Cassie, our dog must sense the chair's special significance as she wouldn't let Hannah take a picture without her in it, though she didn't want to steal the show by facing the camera!


  1. This is just awesome Jane! I love every word of this story. We deserve to be happy! It is our time! Great job pursuing your dream!

  2. Thanks Cindy! I love the chair - it is everything I knew it would be! (How silly, but SO true!)