Mono Monday: Distance

The Victorian rosewood chairs belonged to my great grandmother, Mary Plum (love that name!), who moved from Virginia to Central California with my great grandfather,  before the turn of the nineteenth century. In those distant days, moving was a bit more complicated than it is now. They sailed from colonial Virginia, around Cape Horn and up the West coast with their five daughters and all their possessions, so that my great grandfather could take up a post as a judge in a frontier town.

The furniture, along with silver flatware and Limoges china for twelve came along with them. When my grandmother, married a Presbyterian minister,  in 1902, they inherited the rosewood furniture, which also included a love seat and a larger chair. I'm sure many a parishioner sat in those chairs over the years until he retired and they took the furniture to their permanent residence in the Santa Cruz mountains.

When my grandmother died in the 1950's , my grandfather moved to a retirement home, and my parents became the keepers of the rosewood furniture. I'm not sure just how much my mother liked it, but she appreciated its history and the distance through both time, space and culture it had traveled. When a decorator she was interviewing spotted the chairs, he said, "those will have to go". 
  My mother, shocked, said, "but they came around the horn." 
  "Well they ought to go back," said the decorator. 
He didn't get the job.

When my mother died, my brother took the big chair and I took the two little ones and the love seat. When OilMan and I moved to Santa Rosa two years ago, we, like my mother, had little love and no place for the love seat, which she had had covered which a rather elegant black leather, but couldn't bring ourselves to get rid of it, so it is now in our son's basement.

I had a dream before we moved about how to keep the two small chairs in an open plan, midcentury modern house. We had the bookshelves built  to create a bridge between all the modern and rustic furniture in the rest of the house and these distinctly Victorian antiques that had traveled such a distance.

Thanks again to skeena for this topic and for hosting this challenge so well for so long.