I'm a day late and a dollar short in posting Letter T in the A-Z Blog Challenge, but weekend blogging has never been my thing.
T is for Time
As in I wish I had more of it to write something profound on the subject, but instead let's talk furniture. It's related I promise. Kind of related. In my head it's related.
Thirty years ago hubs and I purchased our first home. It was a cute three bedroom saltbox style house set in a friendly Virginia cul-de-sac. We'd been married two years and we both had good jobs. What we did not have was furniture, or at least not any decent furniture.
Times were different then. We were in our mid-20's and like most young marrieds we knew, made do with hand me down sofas and mismatched linens. We were happy and oblivious and we saved for the day we could buy some pretty furniture.
The house we purchased had something our townhouse did not, and that was a dining room. I will state for the record here that I'm a big big fan of dining rooms. All the trendy talking decorator heads who say people don't use dining rooms anymore will never diminish my affection for a room where meals are shared, holidays are celebrated, conversations are both lively and intimate, and tablescapes lovely.
There's not a lot of lovely in the world, so let's all have dining rooms and serve meals on pretty dishes, k?
When hubs and I were discussing house plans this particular room was naturally up for negotiation. In his mind anyway...in my mind never. Home building requires some compromise, and on this particular point he said okay, let's have a dining room. See paragraph 4. Also, our decorator said nixing the dining room in house design was a thing for a while, but people missed the space and it's not so much a thing anymore.
I love that my dining room is always clean, not something that can be said of every room in the house. And I don't care if it's only used now and then, I enjoy walking past the dining room and catching a glimpse of delicate china in the cabinet, candles on the table, and cloth napkins set beside a plate.
Anyway, thirty years ago hubs and I had our very first dining room, but no furniture to fill it. As it happened hubs younger brother and his bride were living in a little town called Highpoint NC, and if you're not familiar with the town of Highpoint all you need to know is it's the furniture capital of America, or one of them anyway.
In 1986 hubs and I spent a long weekend in Highpoint, visiting his brother and sister-in-law and buying dining room furniture. That furniture has moved with us from Virginia to Ohio to NJ to Maryland to England to NJ and will eventually be at home in South Carolina.
It still makes me happy.
It still makes me happy.
Flash forward thirty years to 2016 and guess where hubs and I spent the day yesterday?
Highpoint, NC.
We're not in the market for dining room furniture, but we do need some bits and pieces for the new house. The store we purchased our dining room set and also a desk for our home office back in 1986 sadly closed it's doors ten years ago, but there are no shortage of places to buy furniture in this town. How could we not stop here?
The worlds largest furniture store with over a million square feet of showroom and over 1000 brands represented. We spent several hours with a very helpful sales rep sitting on couches, assessing the comfort level of outdoor seating, and learning how to create a kitchen table to perfectly fit the new space.
It was not overwhelming at all.
We've been at the home build thing for several months now, so we're accustomed to feeling overwhelmed. Yesterday was what I call our educational visit, and we'll come back once we've revisited the build plans and made certain what we like will actually fit where we think it will go.
I like old furniture. I like antiques and pieces with meaning and history. We'll have some new furniture in the house because there are spaces to fill that didn't need filling in our previous home, but there will be some old favorites too.
If my dining room table could talk the stories she would tell, and honestly I'd love to hear them. Stories about love and family and food and time.
How the years roll by and are marked by memories of family gathered round a table.
I like old furniture. I like antiques and pieces with meaning and history. We'll have some new furniture in the house because there are spaces to fill that didn't need filling in our previous home, but there will be some old favorites too.
If my dining room table could talk the stories she would tell, and honestly I'd love to hear them. Stories about love and family and food and time.
How the years roll by and are marked by memories of family gathered round a table.
