Referbishing me...

Dear Friends;

I am deep in dust and grit. I am covered in bits of sanded stain and worn out sandpaper. I am decorated in paint and primer. I look like a work of art gone wrong. But when I am done I will have another piece of furniture that matches my slowly growing collection. It is one more way that I am attempting to set down some roots. Even though I know that in a handful of days I will be gone again until spring is all but over.

The neighbors just shake their heads as to why I would possibly want to remove the different dark stains on the various pieces of furniture. Cherry, mahogany, black walnut, all dark and dim like the pieces of my past. The wood is solid, as I am. The construction sturdy, as I have become. The paint is white, some gloss, some satin and finished to show the imperfections. Imperfections that I do not consider to be flaws, only another view of beauty peeking out from the coverings. Hints of gold and antique hardware on each piece to display the ties to those that came before me and faced greater challenges than I have. The lines are mostly simple, some are more curved, some a little more detailed, but they have a flow, a connection. Just as the pieces of myself do. And if they get banged up a bit more in the wear and tear of life and change, they will only show the new scars as part of the growing character. These pieces are humble and quiet, but when placed against the right backdrop, they can be breezy or bold or even overwhelming.

It is hard to explain to the guy at the paint counter that I want to cover solid oak with paint. That I want to leave my mark on the things that surround me and make up the sum of me. Even though these pieces are just things and can be gone in an instant, while they are here, they define a part of the me that expressed to the world. The part of me that says I was, I am and I will be.

It is difficult to explain to my family why I would prefer to take something old and worn and long used and make it beautiful. Why I would want to take hours upon hours to refurbish something not quite right when I could just purchase something new that was not quite right.

These pieces tell a story as I do. Some not so beautifully as others. But there is still a story. The brass filigree drawer pulls on my dresser came from Egypt. My Nona brought them to Ethiopia when the family left Cairo. She packed them into her one suitcase when they moved from Addis Abeba to San Diego. And she placed them onto an old dresser until they became so tarnished that no one gave them any thought. These bits of tarnished brass were thought so little of that when the dresser was moved into the garage and used to store tools and fishing reels, no one thought anything about it. Out with the old. The old that had been carried from country to country to country to rest in the recesses of the family garage. When my Nona passed away, my Father took the dresser and placed it in his garage to use for his tools. And there it sat. Peeling green paint and crusted brass waiting until one day, decades later, I came along and asked if I could have it. It was going to be thrown out, and I had no dresser. So off came the hardware to be soaked and scrubbed to a quiet semi tarnished patina. Off came most of the old green paint to be repainted in a satiny white and daubs of gold. I chose to let parts of the green and wood show through, I liked the faded memories that they stirred within the childhood spaces in my brain. And my Dad just shook his head. He helped me to paint, in fact he did much of the work, but he could never understand why I would want it that way. He still cant.

No one knows how my Nona chose to bring this thing while choosing to leave that one. No one knows why she chose to hide away six filigree brass drawer pulls in her suitcase. But she did. For a wealthy woman to walk away from everything she ever knew and to travel from one foreign land to another, taking only what she could fit into one suitcase, those drawer pulls must have meant a great deal to her. And now having known my Grandmother to be the most loving person that I could ever possibly know, those drawer pulls mean something to me. They mean strength. They mean holding onto that small piece of whimsy, even when reality and common sense dictates that it be left behind or forgotten. They mean that beauty can be passed by or handed down, depending on who is looking or choosing not to see.

So I am back to sanding and scraping and painting and bickering with my Dad as he tells me for the fiftieth time that I am doing it wrong. Back to the endless explanations as to why I want to let a little of the old show through or why I want to paint the inside of the drawers as well. And of course back to repeating over and over that I really do want lived in white furniture that can still be livable rather than glossy cherry pieces that we were not allowed to use as children, that still sit in the same places in the “Museum” room, rather than the “living” room.