The Red Chair has a bit of history and maybe that is what helps me think better there, you see it belonged to my grandmother and it dates probably from the forties or the fifties.  It was originally a deep red, slippery fabric-ed chair that was perfect for little kids to slide down the back of, do headstands in, hang their legs over the stuffed arms, etc. My grandmother used to sit in it to worry, her hobby, as she worried she would drum her fingers on the right arm. Sometime in the early 80's, it must have been a bad day for my grandma, because it was transformed into the off-green tweedy chair when it was reupholstered, it was scratchy, no one sat in it for a few years.  The icky green fabric, just a bit too bright to be avocado, faded in the sun when it moved to my mom's house in the '90's waiting until the day in '02 that it was offered to me to help fill my empty living room. With me, it has gone to and fro through five houses, and through  all the states on the Eastern seaboard, except two.  It has always been there, its family.

Seven years ago it was again made the red chair, after I picked some fabric to be used as an accent on it and my mother was determined to make the fabric remnant stretch far enough to slip cover the whole thing. .  She did it, somehow.  The red must have done something for the chair. Suddenly it became the attractive nuisance of furniture, again, with its new look and feel it invited sliding and gymnastic events.  It is perfect for my daughter to do her generation's headstands ( but only when her father is not home to freak out over how she is going to break her neck, of course).

We have living room furniture that is virtually new in the next room, the cushions are used for all sorts of creative uses, forts, dog jumps, whatever, but no one seems to actually sit on  the new furniture. The situation with the Red Chair is different, we will watch the person in current possession, waiting for the moment they need a drink of water and diving into it, sometimes to find that another person, or a cat, was just a bit quicker. No one is sure where the chair gets its power. Unfortunately, this power pulled the cats into thinking that it was a scratching post and the red cover is drooping and dripping threads. Everyone in the house thinks that it is their chair, but really, it owns us.   I was thinking that I might turn it into the purple chair to rectify the cat damage, but then again that might not be quite right, the green was certainly a mistake, purple, maybe, if it leans toward red.  So, this blog is all about thoughts that come to me when I get my turn in the long lived, tattered, rumpled, deep sinking, well-traveled, powerful, and familiar Red Chair.