To sit in mama's chair.

I love to just sit and talk with my sister. Those long, lazy, reminiscing conversations are getting rarer and sweeter the older I get. Now that 600 miles and three little boys that take her answering the phone as their cue to go crazy separate us, it's hard to sit down and just talk.

Last Sunday was one of those rare times. We had just celebrated Easter and my oldest nephews birthday. The boys were upstairs watching a movie and my sister and Ijust talked. We talked about buying a house. Then we talked about how I planned on decorating the house. Somehow we started talking about my mama's chair. We talked about how we missed mama, she'd died when we were young. We talked about what she'd think of us now.

I told my sister I'd been looking for chairs like that to put in my house. They were strong and stately chairs. The kind of chairs that make you feel like you should be making important decisions in them. Maybe smoking a cigar and debating the future of economic relations with China. They were chairs that made you feel like you could do anything. They were also the chairs that my mom would sit in every morning well before the sun came up, and read her Bible and journal. They were the chairs that her and my sister sat and talked in the night before she died. They were weighty chairs. There were two of them. One was a mauve color that went well with a house decorated entirely in pastel pinks and blues, and the other has some nice pastel pink and blue flowers on a silky off white background.

As we sat and talked that Sunday night, my sister and I remembered these chairs with a resigned nostalgia. We both assumed they were sold in the yard sale when we lost the house we grew up in the summer after she'd had her first son and I'd gone off to college. Neither of us had had time or space to save the chairs we'd loved. We never imagined we'd see them again.

Later that week, as I was cleaning out the building at my grandmothers house where we'd stored all the stuff left when the yard sell was over, I was flooded with the memory of a time gone. I found my mom's favorite paintings, and the old steamer trunk we'd used as game storage growing up. I found the old love seat I'd slept on so many nights when we'd have sleepovers with friends downstairs. I found a cast iron skillet passed down from generations before me.

Then, as I was digging to the back corner to look at an old baker's rack my grandmother said I could have. I found the most poised member of the family: mama's chair. I sent a text to my sister, and I'm fairly certain we both wept that day. As I sat in that chair, I felt truly home for the first time in a long time. The mustiness of the building couldn't mask the faint smell of a home lost on the wings of the chair. The stains and cat claw marks couldn't fully hide the strength this chair possessed. She had the strength to bring several adults to a weeping mass of joy. I finally conceded the chair to my sister, sad to see her go, but happy my sister could sit in mama's chair again. But the day wasn't over yet.

When I got back to my aunt's house, I was telling her about the chair, how happy my sister was to get to sit in mama's chair again. Then my aunt told me that she knew where the other chair was. That for the 25 dollars her friend had spent at the yard sale, my sister and I could both have one of mama's chairs. We are both planning to reupholster the chairs and place them in our living room. I can't wait to get it recovered so I can introduce my friends to my mama's chair.