Mottled History: The Love Behind a Peeling Vintage Table

My mother passed on my grandmother’s patio set—an iron table with four ice cream chairs. This furniture has traveled with me through moves to the Midwest, Mid-Atlantic, and Deep South. The temptation to let it go lingered from time to time, but I held on.

Georgia summer heat has me longing for the clock reset in the fall when cool weather brings the urge to clear out and clean up. I love sweater weather with the brush of a much laundered cotton sweatshirt against my skin. That’s when I give the balcony a vigorous sweeping and pot mums and pansies.

Last year, I grabbed coarse sandpaper and wore down layers of old paint on the vintage table so I could freshen it with a bronze color. Running my hands over the just-right smoothness, I saw stories in the splotched surface: black paint from the furniture’s earliest days—maybe when my grandmother sipped morning coffee and gazed on her flowers; green when my mother went for a spring look; and sunny yellow in the hopeful days of my marriage.

A weathered witness to time, the table served family cooks during garden parties, Saturday night barbecues, and drowsy afternoons lulled by the clank of an ice cream churn. How many times did a bee bumble against a careless arrangement of begonias or zinnias gracing the tabletop?

I remember when distressed furniture became “a thing” and never fell out of fashion. Why is that? Nostalgia? Comfort?

Yet when it comes to our own skin, we don’t take too well to aging. Witness my past bathroom drawers of creams and lotions that promised youthful glow. Yet getting older is inevitable. As Truvy (played by Dolly Parton) in Steel Magnolias quipped, “Honey, time marches on, and eventually you realize it is marchin’ across your face.”

My brother once gave me a treasury of Georgia O’Keeffe paintings—oversize flowers, sun-bleached bones, desert landscapes, and mountains of New Mexico. Photographer Malcolm Varon shot her portrait at age 90, revealing a face worn by the elements in the setting of Ghost Ranch. By then, her vision was failing due to macular degeneration.

Some might call her face majestic. In the squint, a gleam. In the smile, knowing humor. In the lines, the etch of blended emotions.

She kept painting, with the assistance of others. She said, “I can see what I want to paint. The thing that makes you want to create is still there.”

What a testament to the vital life force within.

I’ll leave the table as is—a history of generations, including a snow-bound tale that found its way into the poem “Iowa Dreams.”

. . . I plunged boot-deep back to my deck and stopped

to brush off the fishnet metal top of Nannie’s patio table

that once baked on Georgia lemonade days. The wind had rounded

the snow in the laps of the ice-cream chairs, now her plump bridge foursome

greedy for the triumph of sweeping pennies into leather coin purses

that snapped shut, smartly enough, with kiss clasps—

and I longed for iron-worn bedsheets billowing in cumulus

motion on a clothesline as my father staked bean poles

in crooked clay rows and bent to plant Kentucky Wonders

before Good Friday thundered in the Appalachian foothills.

A veteran of Time Inc. and Dotdash Meredith, Catherine Hamrick is the author of The Tears of Things: Poems (Madville Publishing). Her poetry has appeared in Appalachian Places, Appalachian Review, The Blue Mountain Review, The Citron Review, Pine Mountain Sand & Gravel, storySouth, and elsewhere.