Being in the city is so different from life on the High Planes. Donning the mask every time I walk into a public place, not being able to see anyone smile, not that they would be smiling anyway with the way this virus has stolen everyone’s joy. You accidentally get within 4 or five feet of someone and they jump away as if they had been electrocuted. Everyone is not that way of course. Mom’s neighbor invited me into her house to look at the latest renovations she had made to her 1901 farm house. The details of the wood trim are exceptional and has me considering taking all the trim in our old craftsman cottage back to wood, I just love wood. It is from all times. Perhaps the first medium for humanity to express our artistic nature.
Yesterday I was sitting in the yard, listening to the birds, decompressing from the hospital visits. I could see Rachel in the backyard hunched over an old WW2 vintage lawn chair. I had the swamp cooler running and I couldn’t hear anything but it looked like her mouth was moving. At first I thought she was on a cell phone, talking to someone but then she turned her head and I realized she was talking to the chair. I watched for a few more seconds and realized she was having some trouble, so I queried whether she would like some help, catching her by surprise. She started explaining and dragging the chair towards me and I said “No, no, let me come around.” There is a gate between the yards in the little white picket fence that surrounds the old farmhouse. The two and 1/2 story brick house stands like a sentinel. It is of a different time and place than the sea of post WW2, tract homes that surround it. The gate was in the fence before Rachel and Ed moved in and started restoring the house, 40 years ago.
I slipped through the old sagging gate and squeezed between the lilacs planted the entire length, walling off the old farm yard to the world outside, a secret garden. The gate had not been used for a long time. Rachel was working on an old mustard yellow, vintage lawn chair. It would have been one of the first lawn chairs designed and built post WW2. Before that, lawns did not exist except to feed the goats. You either lived in the city or in the country. Lawns were invented when the soldiers returned to a new way of living after the war. Little homes with lawns, our first experience with suburban sprawl.
I believe this design predates the more common stamped steel chairs. While I removed and replaced the bolt on the chair, she let me in on some of the history of the chairs. She called them the ketchup and mustard chairs, I was only looking at the mustard. The chairs are older than Rachel by a decade or two, so she has known them all of her life, handed down to her, to care for now. Will they make another generation or two? They just might. While I was putting the chair back on the patio, I spied a set of Adirondack chairs, a design that predates the steel chairs by about 40 years. In fact these chairs were invented about the same time the house was built. The Adirondack Chair is probably the original lawn chair and my all time favorite.
Lawns and gardens have become our private little pieces of nature. We surround our homes, creating nature in our own image, the appeal is obvious. Rachel has created a wonderful country space, right in the middle of the city. Creating something unique and beautiful is at the heart of why we are here. What is more beautiful than nature?
