Jean and I were in the river room with friends Saturday evening having a pre-dinner glass of wine. Somehow I ended up in a chair where I normally don’t sit. It caused me to focus on a piece of furniture across the room that I usually don’t pay a lot of attention to. It’s an antique vaisselier that we have owned for 23 years. It was in our sun room in Homeland for 11 years and has been in the river room at the farm for the past 12. It’s French, circa 1780, made of walnut in a Louis XV rustique style, beautifully proportioned and as right as rain. The timbers are thick with a beautiful polish on the visible surfaces yet the hidden surfaces (ie, back, drawer bottoms) are really rough, just this side of a tree trunk. Even 250 years ago, time was money and the labor went into what shows.
As I tried to carry on a reasonable conversation about the possibility of a McCain / Obama duel in November, 70% of my brain was devoted to the vaisselier and what it has meant in our lives.
Jean bought it in a little shop in Paris on her 1st ever buying trip in France in 1984, even before we knew the Marche au Puce existed. How naïve we were in those days. I thought about our kids playing hot wheels underneath, Jean displaying a few pieces of her majolica collection, me installing stereo equipment behind the doors and searching for a mouse hole for the power cord. God forbid we would even think about drilling a hole. I still haven’t gotten around to fixing the right front leg that a 5 month old puppy snacked on 20 years ago.
Before getting back to Obama and McCain, I concluded that at least 5, maybe 10 or more French families took care of this piece before we were fortunate enough to have it in our home. I always wonder what their stories would be.
Eat your heart out Ethan Allen.
