Dearest readers,

So one thing I love about my house is that my furnishings are a pretty eclectic combination of spruced up yard sale finds and interesting vintage or family heirloom pieces.  My lemon yellow, paisley print, wool upholstered sitting chair is my favorite–$30 from a neighborhood yard sale last fall.  It is exactly what I was looking for, and it was like it just dropped out of heaven and appeared before my mom and me on that blustery October afternoon.  I *may* also have a few other pieces that happened to belong to former hospice patients of mine.  That’s the problem with serving in hospice in a relatively small community–your patient dies, two months later you’re trolling for estate sales on a Saturday, and (what do you know!) your former patient’s home is suddenly open to the public.  (Potentially very awkward, yes, but fortunately the family isn’t usually there when the sale is happening.)  So I’ll forever remember Mr. So-and-so whenever I stock up my bar cart for the next Derby Day party, or whatever.

A new category of furnishings is “things that people gave me for the sole purpose of making my house not feel so empty.”  Well, and maybe because they love me and wanted to bless me with a useful housewarming gift.

So coming home from work this afternoon, I had a couple hours to read and relax prior to my evening appointments.  What better way to do so than to rock away on my patio in the antique rocking chair my friends Amanda and Trent gave me.  Apparently they had a set of two, but after asking some college-aged neighbors to house-sit one weekend, my lovely friends returned home to one broken rocker and a huge dump left in the guest room toilet.  I know.  Come on, house-sitters–was that really necessary?  I told Amanda straight up what she probably didn’t want to hear, which was that yes, some major drunken debauchery had definitely occurred in their home that weekend, and they were not a part of it.

But, lucky for me, Amanda gifted me with her lone blue rocking chair, and I love it.  It actually really rocks–no, I mean really, that thing has a lot of sway to it.  You have to be careful or it’ll buck you right off.  One night the wind was really blowing hard, and in the morning the chair was completely knocked over.  It rocked it’s own socks off, I guess.

So that’s the chair.  Thennnnnn, this afternoon I was just gifted with a beautiful homemade accent pillow from my other friend Alex and his lovely wife Dana.  What I want to say is, They’re the parents from New York I never had…, except that my parents actually are from New York.  Sooooo, what I will say, is they are like the parents from New York that I do have, only they are the dad-is-a-pastor-and-mom-is-a-homemaker version.  I adore them.  (Alex is also the one who has been helping me tame my landscaping, one two-hour chainsaw session at a time.  I’ll tell you more about that another day–actually probably Saturday since he’s scheduled to come hack away some more then.)  The pillow is quite lovely.  Dana really captured the perfect combination of bright/warm/earth tone colors that I love and that are all over my house.  Plus I pretty much love anything that’s been quilted.  You could give me a toilet seat cover made out of my dad’s underwear, and as long as it was quilted, I’d probably find it quite beautiful.

So that was my evening break–rocking away, with the pillow perfectly filling that space between the small of my back and the otherwise torturous spines of the back of the chair.  It was lovely, quite lovely indeed.  So I wrote a little haiku capturing how much I enjoy, and will continue to enjoy, rocking and reading away on my patio.

Coming home from work

I sit on my patio

held up by friends’ love.

Liz