In 1982, our family lived for a time in a three story Victorian house with halls and nooks and crannies as well as rooms that swallowed the furniture we brought with us when we moved from a suburban home back to the small town where both Joe and I grew up. Living there and working on the home's restoration was both fascinating and flabbergasting. Part of the hard work and happy times we had there was giving myself an occasional afternoon for prowling in second hand and junk shops for pieces to restore and use in the house. One day I found this rocker stuck in the middle of a pile of discarded tables and chairs. The fanciful curlicues and swirls drew me to look closer at the wicker weaving on the back of the chair but when I looked down I saw straight through. There was no seat, only some tattered strips of rotting burlap hanging to the frame by the tenacity of dozens of tiny rusted nails. A few pieces of trim curls were missing, the color was best described as dirty, and mud dauber nests clung to the underside of the arms. I believe the shop owner laughed as he watched me load the chair into my truck as he stuffed the $20 bill he had required as payment into his pocket!
My youngest son, Ben, was game to help me pry out over 200 nails from the seat of the chair and scrub it down to get rid of the insect homes and cobwebs. I had never done caning, but I ordered a piece of cane webbing, spline, chisels and glue which cost more than the chair had. We soaked the webbing, pounded the spline into the groove of the shaped seat and watched in amazement as it all dried and began to tighten to make a new seat. We got more white paint on us than on the chair, but began to feel a sense of pride as this beautiful Victorian rocker emerged to take its place in our new old home. When I rock a grandchild in it or tuck a pillow in its seat, I still have a sense of all the stories it could tell me. One story would be that of a rescue.
