by Marylou Ambrose

My husband and I own lots of stuff. I imagine most Boomers do. Most of our furniture was handed down from the Ambrose family, except for a few pieces of mine that I had when we got married. Of these, exactly one thing—a little kid’s rocking chair—is from my childhood home. My parents grew up during the Depression and they didn’t like “old” things, like Oriental rugs, which they thought looked shabby. I tend to agree, at least about the rugs.  

On the other hand, Art’s family just loved old, shabby things. I know this because we inherited a house full of them. Today’s young people, including our son, call it “brown furniture.” They don’t want any part of what we can’t bear to part with.   

Travis’s house is filled with modern, gray and black furnishings devoid of personality. Our house, on the other hand, is chock full of stuff that shouts, “Look at me! I’m old! I have a story to tell!” Unfortunately, our son isn’t all that interested in what Art’s father’s old chair or his mother’s dresser has to say. 

But I am.  

I knew nothing about household furnishings (or anything domestic, for that matter), until my early twenties. My first husband’s aunt and uncle were antique collectors, and they taught me to appreciate old stuff. Looking back, it was more of an affectation on my part. I was all gushy when Uncle Bill and Aunt Alice gave us a silver tea service as a wedding gift. It was completely useless, of course, the kind of thing you see in Merchant-Ivory films, but I thought it looked elegant in our corner cabinet—where it sat unused and unpolished for the next seven years, until we got divorced. I let my ex have it. I knew a silver tea set wouldn’t fit with my single-girl, apartment lifestyle. 

A half-dozen years later, Art and I got married. He lived in an old summer cabin and he hadn’t done much work on it. Consequently, all the furnishings he’d inherited from his parents were still sitting in a storage unit. Having a wife move in ramped up the renovations, and by the time we celebrated our first Christmas as a married couple, our newly remodeled living room was ready to accept the family heirlooms.   

Besides brown furniture, these heirlooms consisted of boxes and barrels filled with china, crystal, silver, and other household items. Unpacking them was a huge job, but I loved every minute of it because the Ambroses had some really great stuff. 

We still use most of that stuff today, although I only haul out the china, silver, and crystal on holidays and other special occasions. The brown furniture has been mostly refinished, and the chairs, reupholstered. After more than 40 years, the house is just how we want it, and we don’t plan on any further renovating. It looks beautiful, a far cry from the old summer cabin with no closets, no insulation, and no central heating.  

After we die, Travis will probably tear it down and build his dream house—something that resembles several containers stuck together. If so, I plan to come back and haunt him.  

I took a spin through our house this morning, admiring our stuff and listening to the stories it told me. The drop-leaf table in the kitchen has a middle drawer where I used to keep Travis’s bibs when he was a baby. A marble-top cabinet stores bags of birdseed, bottles of water, and reusable grocery sacks. For 13 years, it was relegated to the basement to make room for a wooden dog kennel. Now that Sadie’s gone, the two pieces of furniture have traded places. Hanging on the wall near the back door is a red-framed drawing, the first recognizable truck Travis ever drew. I think he was about three years old when he made it. 

The dining section of the living room is like a mini museum. To the right of the fireplace is a grandfather clock circa 1800. It has a diagonal crack in the glass face that gives it even more character. Above the mantel is a reproduction of a painting called “The Pharaoh’s Horses,” by the 19th century artist, John Frederick Herring. It depicts three Arabian horses, heads, necks, and chests only, but after a bit of research, I discovered it was the same horse, just three different poses. Travis says the picture gives him the creeps, and I can sort of understand because one horse looks fierce, with flattened ears and flared nostrils. I love this painting. 

To the left of the fireplace is a ceiling-high piece of furniture we call “the breakfront.” It’s actually two pieces: a glass-fronted bookcase on top and a cabinet on the bottom. In between, there’s a fold-down desk covered inside with green felt. The cabinet holds at least six complete and partial sets of china. I love setting my table with these dishes for special occasions. I wonder if the breakfront might have originally been a printer’s cabinet because it has a couple dozen close-set grooves in each side where shelves fit. It’s a mystery to me.  

Across the room is a buffet from the 1930s, an ugly piece of brown furniture with peeling veneers that we got repainted white by a local refinisher. It looks gorgeous! It stores all our crystal, silver flatware, and tablecloths and napkins. Years ago, before the repainting, I crawled underneath for some reason and discovered several pieces of petrified chewing gum stuck to the bottom. I laughed thinking of all the kids over the years hiding underneath things, sticking their gum in places it shouldn’t be. Did one of those pieces of gum once belong to Art? 

The living room area contains a marble-top coffee table that’s so heavy, once you’ve placed it, it’s there for life. The end table is my favorite piece of furniture in the whole house. It’s called a “security table” because the top lifts up and conceals a hiding place for your jewels and other valuables. That’s where I used to keep the family jewelry Art gifted me, back when I actually used to wear it. Now, it’s all in a safe deposit box. The furniture refinisher told us he thought the table was “museum quality,” but I’m pretty sure that wouldn’t be true once it was refinished.   

The chair to the right of the couch has been repaired, refinished, and reupholstered in the same fabric I bought for the dining room chairs and a new chair I use for reading. It’s a pattern of leaves against an off-white background. The chair used to be in Art’s father’s study, covered in gold material. Art sat in it when his father was dying of cancer and listened to his dad explain about finances and trust funds and tell him, “Take care of your mother.” She died of cancer herself a year later. My husband was only 30 years old.  

Except for the couch, which is fairly new, the only major piece of living room furniture that isn’t an Ambrose antique is a Shaker-style rocker that was mine before Art and I got married. It used to be upstairs in Travis’s room (now the guest room). I nursed him in that chair and rocked him to sleep in it every night.  

The TV room contains two mahogany pedestal tables. One is an end table and the other folds down into a gaming table with the same green felt as the breakfront. I remember thinking, “This looks like an accident waiting to happen” when Travis was just learning to walk. I was right. It wasn’t long until he fell and hit his head on one of the curved table legs. But he survived and his brain seems intact today, even though he doesn’t appreciate brown furniture. One other piece of furniture in the TV room is noteworthy: the coffee table. It’s something else I contributed to the household. It’s about four feet long and was Travis’s drawing table for years. I remember Art’s friend, whose family owned the local newspaper, gave us a roll of newsprint. Travis kept it on the floor and used to pull it across the table with a flourish when he needed a clean sheet of paper to create on.   

Upstairs in the hall is a gate-leg table that belonged to my first husband’s grandfather. I used it as my dining table when I lived in an apartment, but it was hard to sit at because the legs were in such odd positions. In our bedroom, we have three old brown dressers. The most interesting one belonged to Art’s father and was apparently designed to hold folded, pressed dress shirts because it has shallow, pull-out drawers. Art keeps his T-shirt collection there.   

I could go on and on about the treasures in our house, but I think I’ve said enough. Oh wait, did I mention that a narrow bookcase in Travis’s old room holds the children’s books I couldn’t part with like Owl Moon and Henry and Mudge? Or that besides the grandfather clock we have five other antique clocks that all chime at different times? And that almost all the artwork on the walls is by friends and family members, including two original paintings by Juan Espino, a well-known local artist; another “original” by Travis, a self-portrait drawn when he was six years old; and several watercolors by my sister Diane, who now lives in Australia? Then there’s the portable Smith-Corona typewriter from the 1930s that my mother used in business school that I used all through journalism school. It sits on a shelf in my office, next to the 1960s black rotary phone that came with the house when Art bought it and that we used until just a few years ago. And then there’s…

Never mind. You get the point. This is our stuff and this is our life. You can’t take it with you, but you sure hope that someday, someone you love might take it with them.