Markers

When I described my husband’s half-hearted approval of my bed purchase for Sis, I alluded to our already full flat—we’d collected a lot of furniture by that time. We knew that we wouldn’t be living overseas forever, I was determined to make our lives comfortable at home, and we found some beautiful things for very little money that we would never have found in America. We saw these things as markers of our journey. Reminders of where we were when we started our life together and built our family. Everything had a story, too. I’ve shared some of them here between the custom Ikea knock-offs and Sissy’s bed, but there was more.

There was the Estonian furniture factory we found out about. We took some American business men there when they were scoping out exporting opportunities, and the boss ended up purchasing whole container load of their furniture to send to the US to test the market. He had my husband place the order and as they were deciding on inventory, the American casusally told him, “pick out whatever you and Maren want—thanks for taking me there.” So we ended up with several pieces of beautiful solid birch with exposed dovetail joints, including a dining table and six chairs, sideboard with a hutch, a short little dresser, a secretary desk, and a sewing box I fell in love with.

Then there was the day my husband came home and told me about a big wardrobe he’d seen at an antique shop. Closets didn’t exist and we desperately needed a place to hang clothes. He said it was huge, but the nice part was that it was engineered to disassemble neatly (so that it could be moved) and that it had a mirror. We went back together to check it out and I hated it! It was dark, ugly and old lady looking, but then I spotted a gorgeous old crusty oak hutch (another hutch!) with nickel pulls, original etched glass, and jugendstil details and carvings. I told him I wasn’t buying the wardrobe unless we could buy this, too!
“Mar, we don’t need another hutch!” But look at it. We’ll have it refinished. This is a special piece. “Yeahhhhh, maybe you’re right…” Of course I’m right. Meanwhile the Russian shop keeper was cooing at my kids as he dressed them up with heavy, battleship-gray wool Soviet military hats…We checked out the hutch, dusted it off with our fingers and the Russian man saw our mild interest. In a strange mix of Russian-Latvian-German-English, he told us a price for both the wardrobe and the hutch. No good. We dickered with him a bit longer and in the end, we purchased both pieces and all walked out with Soviet hats atop our heads.

The wardrobe certainly filled a need, but its been sitting in pieces in my garage for years.  The oak hutch is one of my favorite things and stands gracefully over me as I type this.