When we found out that we were expecting, one of the things we did to prepare for the arrival of he baby was to purchase a rocking chair. At the time unfinished furniture stores were popular and we found a solid wooden rocker that fit the bill at a price that we could afford. At the time we lived in a very small town that didn’t have that kind of store, so purchased the chair in the town where Susan’s parents lived while on a trip to visit them. Fitting the chair into our small car was a bit of an adventure, but we managed to haul it home. I spread out papers in the garage and applied stain and then varnish to the chair and it became an important part of our living room decor. It has traveled with us when we have moved and lived with us in four different states.

I spent a lot of hours rocking in that chair with our son and daughter. I’ve rocked each of our grandchildren in that chair as well. The years have passed and the chair is now 42 years old. It has scratches on one of the rockers from a cat who treated it as a scratching post. The glue in the joints has dried and it creaks when we rock. It is about due for a bit of care. I know enough about furniture repair to take it apart, reassemble it with fresh glue, sand it down and refinish it. The job is somewhere on my list of tasks, but not one that I have gotten around to doing. Meanwhile the chair is sturdy and in no danger of falling apart and the noise it makes when rocked has a rhythm that seems to be soothing to the baby when we rock.

It is one of the few pieces of furniture in our home whose story I know from the time it was purchased. Most of our furniture wasn’t new when it came to our house. When we were students we rented furnished apartments. The only piece of furniture we owned in the first five years of our marriage was a desk that my parents had bought for me when I was in high school and that had been in my college dorm room and each of our student apartments. When we got our first job, we moved into a parsonage with three bedrooms and a finished basement. With the help of Susan’s parents we managed to scrape together enough garage sale furniture to have a kitchen table, a bed, a sofa and a chair for the living room.

Not long afterward we made a trip to the farmhouse where Susan’s Aunt and Uncle had lived before moving to town and they gave us a dining room table and chairs. Over the years various family members downsized and moved and we obtained pieces of furniture here and there. We have purchased a few pieces of furniture over the years, but it has never been a very high priority for our spending.

Now we find ourselves in the position of having more furniture than we need. We downsized when we moved from Rapid City and again when we moved from our rental home to this house. Our bedroom count has dropped from five to three. We’ve managed to find new homes for some of our excess furniture, but we still have more stored at our son’s farm and there is an extra bed stored in our garage.

One of the challenges for us is that our experience is that well-made furniture lasts longer than one lifespan. Our dining table was in Susan’s parents’ house before we got it and it was used when they got it. We have a rocking chair, a dresser, and a bed that were in her grandparents’ house. These items have stories and they have become precious to us because of those stories.

Some of those pieces of furniture - and some of those stories have been passed down to future generations. That dining room table that we hauled from the old farmhouse to our parsonage in North Dakota is now in our daughter’s home in South Carolina. We hauled it to them when they were in their first home in Missouri. It was in storage while they lived in Japan and now has been moved to South Carolina where it serves as our daughter’s craft table.

But not every piece of furniture - and not every story - will be passed down inside of our family. Some of the furniture will be passed to other families and some of the stories will be lost. Of course, giving up a piece of furniture doesn’t mean that the story has to be lost. Our grandchildren know the story of the rocking chair near our front door even though they are unlikely to ever have it in their homes. We still love to tell the story of borrowing a pickup truck to haul a table and chairs to our house when we started our first job after school. The desk that served us as students and that made a couple of moves with us is no longer part of our possessions, but I still sometimes tell about hauling it to college my freshman year crammed in the back of a family car that moved three of us to college.

For now, however, the rocking chair is one piece of furniture that I want to keep. I’ll find time to give it a bit of love and attention in the next few years. It will sport a fresh finish and new varnish unless something unforeseen happens. I’ve joked about sitting around in my rocking chair when I retire. I still don’t have too much time for just sitting, but the chair will be ready for me when I do have the time. And, in the meantime, there is still a baby to rock in our family. Even the older grandkids still like to have a rock from time to time. Who knows? Someday we may need to rock a great grandchild. The chair will stay with us for now.