My Favourite Chair

The oak-square legs sit on rubber footholds with fainted brown foot-rails fixed within holes from leg to leg, two on each side and one to the backside. The loosened joints lean on sitter’s lead creaking like a door in a haunted house, yet sustaining weight favourably, like a great book with a boring chapter one.

The seat is made of thick strings of tanbarks, stretched, bound and tight together, from each side to the centre, reversing underneath and back to the sides, like a straw case, creating a small dent in the middle. Rubbing the seat gently feels like sandpaper; a sudden friction though, will gash naked skin like a razor. It is not really offered for relaxation of any kind, rather for restive times of excitement or disappointment where action prevails and a need calls for unsettledness. Between this chair and any other, one would probably choose ‘any other’, but I wouldn’t mind ‘this’.

The name I scribbled with a key when I was eight, on the back posts and top-rails, have been crossed off by nicks and scratches from being tossed around the lumber-room. So many years in exile, never broke its wooden spirit, and now, rules like an archetype among contemporary living rooms. Still, the smell, reminds me of sawdust and adobe, even after the carpenter’s scumble, like the carpenter himself and his small workshop within the old town walls. A scent that tastes like a farmhouse loaf that lost its freshness.

A ten year old girl could lift the chair up with her weak hand and move around the house, thus it is not used as a decoration object. It’s more like a joker with an adjustable attitude that works out everything and fits in everywhere with a wide smile on his face.
The chair’s name is ‘The Granny’. It belonged to my late grandmother who kept it in her backyard by a wooden table where grandfather used to enjoy summer Sunday afternoons over a game of backgammon with friends.

‘Coffee and pear conserves and then a glass of cold lemonade. He never missed a Sunday’, my grandmother used to say.
I heard it so many times, her voice still echoes in my ears. I visualized it so many times that my eyes swell with tears and I even miss their ghosts. ‘The Granny’ is a monument in respect of her and her memories.
‘The Granny’ has already earned a place in history and its value lies within the linkage of generations.