Saturday, April 11, 1998

Furniture reminds of loved one gone

By Rheta Grimsley Johnson

It is a blond lingerie chest about the size of a beehive, with three deep drawers and two curling layers of laminate on top. One person can move it about.

Not a thing of rare beauty, but nonetheless a joy forever.

This is a family piece, not any fine antique. It probably was bought in the late 1940s or early '50s when most furniture and movie stars went sleek and blond; metal pulls and cube legs also date it.

My Uncle Cary ran a furniture store in downtown Blakely, a rambling emporium that smelled deliciously of new wood and fabric and reasonable credit terms. He carried modern swivel rockers and old-fashioned tapestry couches -- something for everyone's taste.

I bet he surprised my grandmother with the little chest on some occasion or another. She kept it next to her bed.

I made a special trip recently to get the chest out of storage. I had worried about mildew or warping and rued the day I went off without it.

Now it sits next to my own bed, hiding imperfections with a scarf of lace, like a Barcelona matron on her way to church. The old lamp I put on top paints the room pink each night.

I remember what she kept in every drawer. That seems odd, when I think about it, to know the contents of someone else's drawers.

But we children routinely inspected every inch of my grandmother's house and never considered it plundering. If she minded, she never said. There was nothing in her humble home that was off-limits, not even her underwear drawers.

When we broke things, she glued them back together. When we forgot to put things back in their place, she quietly did it for us.

If ever there was a life that could bear a child's relentless scrutiny, it was hers.

In one of those drawers she kept a box of photographs. People didn't buy a frame a week back then. Who could afford it? Sometimes a precious picture ended up in a drawer, tucked between Leviticus and Numbers.

Her Bible was in that drawer, too, along with newspaper clippings or photographs from The Progressive Farmer that she wanted to save. She often clipped poems that spoke to her. They always rhymed.

We think of those we love with a change of season; why that's so I'm not sure. But it's as inevitable as the cool nights and wild onions of spring, a mental inventory of people gone, not forgotten.

She would have been planting her flower seed this time of year, zinnias and sweet peas and marigolds, beneath the windmill or in some other spot the cows couldn't reach. She'd be planning an elaborate Easter dinner, and helping sweep the winter out of Oak Grove Church before its busiest Sunday.

And she would have been putting the finishing touches on my Easter dress, embroidering the top or adding the pinafore. They would fill a large room, those perfect little Easter dresses, a garden of voile and taffeta and polished cotton, meticulously stitched and hemmed.

They always arrived by mail, in plenty of time, bundled up in brown paper and tied with recycled string, lumpy, loose packages the post office would laugh at these days.

Even as tiny tots we knew her handwriting. And we counted on her dresses. The ones off the rack were never the same.

I haven't put anything in the chest just yet. It seems a shame to fill it with socks. The drawers are empty, waiting for business. Only mine seems too mundane.

King Features Syndicate