Old Things

I’ve been thinking about the stuff people find  inside their walls, under their floorboards or wallpaper -  like the pencil-sketched dirty picture I found under three layers of wallpaper, the date “1929” scrawled primly underneath.My friend found something much more interesting in the rafters of her house when she went to repoint the chimney: two bottles of whiskey dated 1853 and 1874, both with labels perfectly legible, and an 1844 pamphlet called “General Rules for the Preservation of the Teeth,” stating that ill health in the mouth makes for ill health throughout the body, an idea many of us consider new.I've lived in four houses over the course of my life, all of which have provided me with unexpected ‘gifts’: the place we live in now, a stove from the 1920s, a fridge from the ‘30s and a cast iron form into which you pour hot tallow for the making of candles. From the place before that, left by someone generations before in the dank old cellar, the headboard to a bed, gummy with a century’s worth of grit, for whose sake I taught myself the art of refinishing.As it happens we've used that headboard ever since – and though we've never used the matching footboard, we’ve kept it as well, for the all-too-human toenail marks scratched into its finish, and for the way the whole thing is bowed outward, having been pushed at night after night by the force of some long-gone boy's ever-lengthening legs.These gifts are to me treasures and I’m so glad I learned how to restore them. Because by what other alchemy could you pull honey-hued maple out from under a blackened finish smeared with the rings of 100 paint cans? Now, what was once an ugly hulk is a graceful buffet standing tall on handsome turned legs.As it happens I taught myself to reupholster too which allowed me to turn a horsehair sofa from my mother’s basement  into something that simply lights up my whole living room.

(Click to enlarge.)

There is so much lost on the human journey, so much we must all too soon relinquish, our strength, our fleetness of foot, you name it.... How sad yet oddly comforting the way our things outlive us, and  by so many years.

The old headboard is obscured by the children but here it still is, as you see. (Again click to enlarge.)