This week, I said goodbye to a friend of 14 years. In typical Southern fashion, she headed out in the back of a GMC pickup truck to her new home in Georgia. I’ll miss her.
This friend is actually a piece of furniture, an old worn armoire not much taller than me. But it’s been with me for 14 years and with my husband for 40.
At one time it resided in a haunted house in Hattiesburg, where it held a college boy’s belongings. Then it found its way to my Magnolia kitchen. I used it to store three sets of dishes, my CD collection, my classroom textbooks, my recipe books — mostly unused — and all the unscented candles I could fit on the bottom shelf.
We’re moving into another Magnolia house soon — not far away — but there’s no place for the armoire there, which makes me, understandably, somewhat sad.
I grew up in my family’s furniture store, with my grandfather, and then my mama, as owners. Joe Barnes Furniture was my first playground. My sisters and I climbed up the rolls of linoleum flooring like spiders. We played hide-and-seek among four spacious rooms of La-Z-Boy recliners and Bassett and Broyhill living and bedroom sets.
We weren’t allowed to jump on the mattresses, though I may have occasionally violated the no-jumping code, and I definitely sprawled out on every mattress in the store. Even now, I recognize a quality mattress.
And so early on, I was indoctrinated into an attachment to furniture. I learned wood grains and colors, and could differentiate among cherry, walnut, oak, maple and pine. I basked in the aroma of the wood furniture fresh off the delivery truck.
Later in life, I would continue my education by traveling with Mama to market in Dallas, the Disney World of furniture, where she would treat me to any item of my choosing.
While much of my family furniture remains in our Summit home, now housing its fourth and fifth generations, a few special pieces will travel with me to Joe’s and my next home.
My daughter Meredith was in upper elementary school when I bought her a beautiful four-poster bed. One day she was shopping with me in a small antique store on Robb Street in Summit when I spied an exquisite French-style vanity. I’d never seen one like it and although pricey, I knew it would go perfectly with her bed.
On a teacher’s salary, I couldn’t pay for it all at once, but the owner and my friend, Nancy Soyars, graciously allowed me to place it on lay-away.
For some reason, I told Meredith not to tell her daddy about my little shopping spree. We left the store and no more than 20 steps away, she spotted her daddy on the sidewalk. The first words out of her mouth were, “Daddy, Mama just bought me a dresser. It cost 680 dollars!”
So much for secrets. But that vanity and bed still await Meredith when she visits.
An oak table with eight chairs from Mars Hill will also make its way to the new home. It belonged to my great-grandmother Avis, then my grandmother Ustane, then Mama and now me.
Mama remembers eating some of the best meals of her life at her Butler grandparents’ table “out in the country,” and we both remember eating hundreds of similar meals at this very table at my grandmother’s. Most everyone thinks their grandmother the best cook ever. Mine was.
While the meals now served at this table don’t hold a candle to its foremothers, I don’t mind. I love pressing my palms into the wood and knowing I’m sitting in the exact chair, even if a bit wobbly, as my great-grandmother did. I write at this table, which has become as necessary and as nourishing as food.
I know enough to know that one day, this old oak table, like the little armoire, will be someone else’s. But I don’t think it possible anyone could treasure it more.
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JANELLYN B. CORNACCHIONE recently retired from a 40-year teaching career in three Pike County schools.
