Picture us, a young married couple, in a newly purchased home trying to fill it with furniture. We headed to Toronto's Harbourfront on a sunny winter's day, where the largest antique market in the city is open on Sundays. Having set out late in the afternoon, the purchase of this dining set and secretary was made hurriedly & decisively as closing time was honing in on both the seller & the buyers. All the pieces are from the 1920s and we only meant to purchase the much-needed dining set, but somehow we haggled our way into buying the secretary & a couple of tin decorative plates.
We had settled on a Friday delivery (for which I even took the day off work) and the weather had dramatically changed to blizzard-like conditions. As the day progressed with more snow & still a furniture no-show, I began to worry that I'd have to seat my guests on the floor the next day for our very first dinner party. Finally the delivery men arrived, harried & tense, after negotiating their truck up the Don Valley Parkway, the windy-est highway Toronto has, to unload my precious cargo. I don't remember who was more relieved, me for having my dinner party saved from disaster, or the delivery men for having reached their destination unscathed.
To me, the memory of that original day, a winter's day verging on being spring-like, was that I was happy with my life, doing all those type of adulty aspirational things that people do. Before that, I felt like I was some sort of fraud, but the act of buying a house & filling it with historical pieces of someone else's life all helped dispel those feelings that "I'm not doing it right". Perhaps it was the "patchworking" of my history to the fabric of someone else's history through these antiques which helped ground me in the ordinariness of human life.
So when Orest now complains that the secretary has finished meeting our needs & is just a junk repository, I am somewhat less inclined to give it the heave-ho than he is. I'm too sentimental, I guess.
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