Mostly, though, running the alleys means encounters with things I didn’t know I was looking for, such as new stools for our breakfast counter. The old stools, although painted and repaired numerous times, have largely disintegrated after 23 years of heavy use, one so much that we even turned it into a cat climbing tree. So when I saw big, well-made stools in an errant alley, home they went with me. They were peeling paint, dirty, a little wet from one of our only mini rains in months, and covered with spider webs, mud, and dust.
As I was scrubbing them, then after they dried, sanding and scraping them, I wondered if this was a stupid endeavor. After all, there’s Ikea just 40 minutes away with plenty of cool new stools, plus killer coffee and Swedish meatballs required for any shopper on a mission. Ever the optimist, I thought I could prepare them for painting in a jiffy, but that was far from true. There was also a crack in one of the wooden stats, but before I could talk myself out of this project, Ken showed up with wood glue, a drill, and those brace-holder thingies to repair the slat, so I kept scraping and sanding.
With Radio Bob doing my favorite weekly show, Trail Mix, in the background, I just immersed myself in the likes of Irish ballads and piercing folk tunes while whittling away specks of paint, smoothing edges, and trying not to gauge the wood too much. I have a lot of paint in our basement leftover from numerous projects and yearning to be put to use, but what was on my mind the most was the recent periwinkle and whatever color you would call light, bright blue-green delight my friend Pam and I used to paint the greenhouse this month.
Last night as the sun was going down, I painted those stools those colors, eventually needing to hook up a lamp via an extension cord, which didn’t really help me see what I was doing much better but gave me the illusion of not painting in the dark. I relied on hunches and lots of extra paint, figuring I would touch it all up this morning, but when I came out today to check on the chairs, I found them thoroughly painted with such a few drips and some opposing brush strokes.
There’s something immensely satisfying about adopting trash and training it to be something to park our butts on while we catch up on our days in between eating leftover white cherries and guzzling fizz water. These babies, caught fresh from the alley and reformed into pastel perches, will migrate to the kitchen, joining so much other recycled furniture, once hovering on the edge of destruction and now holding our books, tchotchkes, meals, and even us.
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