The Old Family Rocking Chair

The Old Family Rocking Chair by Cassandra Meyers

Shhh - listen!

Rest your head against the back, just there.

Can you hear them? She is sixteen, bursting with delight at the prospect of the first purchase for their new home. Can you hear her giggle? He is twenty-two, outwardly quiet, inwardly filled with justifiable pride. Already he has built a home for his bride. He has put together a lovely oak bed frame, a couple of barrel chairs, and a number of shelves. Today, despite the devastating world-wide economic depression, he has even earned enough money to buy his wife a rocking chair.

Touch the frame of the chair they chose. Run your hands along the curved, hand-carved arms. There have been so many to caress them since that long ago day, the patina is warmer and softer now.

Sit back and breathe deeply. Do you smell the new wood scent? Close your eyes, if you must, and take a whiff. Let the long ago smells buried deep in tongue-and-groove waft across your senses. How many scents can you identify?

Me? Just looking at this old family rocking chair sends waves of sensation over me. That young couple lived over 70 years ago. He was my father. She was his first wife who died at 28, the twins she bore then dying also.

I picture them cuddling in the chair together shortly after its purchase. Three years later, I see her rocking her first-born daughter, crooning lullabies to her. Another little girl arrives in another three years to sing to and rock; and then, two years after that, a son.

Only eleven years into their marriage, she is gone. I see my father rocking quietly in that chair as he gathers his surviving children to him, comforting the 5 and 8 year old daughters and 3 year old son the best he can, drawing comfort from them as well. I hear his almost silent, anguished cries at night, all alone, sitting in that chair, remembering his first love.

Later I see other women, housekeeper-nannies come to care for the children so Daddy can continue to work. There are a number of them in the following weeks and months, but only one who sits in the rocking chair. She sits in the chair when one of the children has a scrape or a bump, gathers the child to her, cleans the scrape and cuddles the child. Soon all three children are looking for an excuse to be held by her, to giggle with her, be read to by her, and be rocked by her in the family rocking chair.

Ultimately the rocking chair nanny becomes my mother, and the rocker is an anchor in our home. Even the family doctor stops by on occasion to sit in the rocking chair, peruse my father’s “Peoples of the World” book, and fall asleep.

Both parents rock me in that chair, first one, then the other; five years later, there is a wonderful baby brother to rock there as well. We sit together, brother and sister, telling each other stories, laughing, giggling, occasionally quarreling . That’s when the chair tosses us from its gentle embrace; we return, humbled, and curl into its comforting arms once more.

There are black streaks in the chair’s wood. Not dirt, not grime, not soil, but the blackness of deaths. The father, a favorite uncle, the younger brother.

Many other deaths over the years stain and streak the old rocking chair, too. For over seventy years it has held us and comforted us, listened to our laughter and absorbed our tears. Its tongue-and-groove and wooden peg construction creaks almost as badly now as do its ancient iron springs. It has held us when we were new on earth; it has comforted us as we breathed our last. It is nothing more than wood and iron, its cushions filled with the dust of time.

It is nothing special to most - it is everything special to me.

The old rocker sat in the living room in the Peasley Canyon Road home, and in the Tacoma house, too. Mama redid the cushions from the original yucky ones, and covered them in a brown dot fabric. At the motel, she had me draw a picture of a mountain, a tree, and the words "FOOTHILL MOTEL", which she then used as a pattern to crochet a new cover for the cushions as you can see. (email from Cassandra)