Changes

{sigh} Feeling a little better now.

Donating my beloved old Restoration Hardware easy chair and ottoman to my son’s cause made me feel weirdly sad. I mean, how stupid, huh? Feeling depressed over a 15-year-old CHAIR???????

The back and leg have been hurting so much I no longer can sit in most of the furniture in the house, certainly not for more than a few minutes at a time. The big, comfortable (…well, formerly comfortable) chair in the TV room presented several problems:

• The seat’s depth is longer than my thighs, so my feet don’t touch the floor. That’s never mattered, because the big ottoman turned the thing into a kind of chaise longue, perfect for parking in front of the television with a computer on your lap.

• It has such a nice big seat, and its soft overstuffed arms are at exactly the right height for curling up and falling asleep. And that’s exactly what happens, no matter how hard I try not to fall asleep in front of the mind-numbing television.

In either event — whether I sit there with feet up on the ottoman and a computer perched on my lap or whether I actually try to watch the television with the sound muted through the endless stupid advertising and end up falling asleep while waiting for the program to come back on, the result is agony. Just sitting in the chair long enough to watch a program or write a blog post causes leg and hip pain. But holy mackerel! Falling asleep in the damn thing invariably leaves me with such violent, awful sciatic cramps I can barely crawl down the hallway. A couple of times I’ve thought I wasn’t going to make it to the bedroom.

Ugh.

I dragged in a wooden chair from the back porch, made a cushion for it, and tried sitting in that.

It’s not too bad. Sitting in anything causes pain, but chairs that force one to sit up straight cause less pain. It’s apparently loafing, slouching, and curling up in a ball with your head on a chair arm that cause serious hurting. A smaller chair that allows the feet to rest on the ground helps, and also there’s no way anything larger than a cat could fall asleep in the thing.

The other chair in the TV room is a very pretty, very useless wicker rocking chair I got on a whim from Pier One. Like most Pier One furnishings, it looks good and feels…well…pretty awful. LOL! I have yet to find a comfortable piece of furniture at that place. So it’s a decorator item, not a chair.

Copenhagen Imports sells a small, leather-covered swivel chair that I’ve always found extremely comfortable and that’s small enough to let my feet hit the ground. It’s about the same size and shape as the outdoor chair…just looks as though it were intended to be inside. If I put the laptop on a TV table, I can sit here for a half-hour or forty-five minutes without too much consequence. I imagine the softer seat will extend that time a little.

So I gave my beautiful easy chair to my son. And he wasn’t real happy about it. The thing has a (very faded, very tired) rose-patterned slip cover, which he hates. He thinks it’s unmanly.

To replace the slip covers will cost about $460 for the chair and another $250 for the ottoman, and that’s on the low end. He can’t afford that, so even though new slip covers probably would extend the chair’s life another 10 years (it’s otherwise in fine condition), it ain’t gonna get any restoration work.

So it made me sad to give it to him, because he didn’t much want it.

But what really made me feel sad was just having to get rid of it. Being forced to get rid of a beloved object because of a growing disability.

It feels like the first step toward the day when I’ll no longer be able to live in my home. That time is coming. Maybe not soon. But eventually it will get here. And then I’ll have to lose this place that I’ve come to love and that I really don’t want to empty out and leave. Certainly not to have to go into an old-folkerie.

Very, very sad, that echoey, empty room.

Well.

I got out the throw M’hijito gave me a Christmas or two ago. It happens to have the same colors as the cushion and pillows on the wicker rocker — reds with green and turquoise accents. For that reason I got the Copenhagen chair, which will be delivered next Wednesday, in a dark brown leather (it comes in a wild spectrum of colors): so it will match the coffee-colored wicker. The wooden yard chair is brown, too…so the throw kind of gives the idea of how this new throne is going to look.

Then, dog notwithstanding, I pulled an old area rug down from a closet shelf. It goes with the curtains and also picks up some of the colors in the pillows and throw. And of course it absorbs enough sound to bring a stop to the empty-cave echo effect.

And actually, it looks pretty nice.

So I suppose there’s no reason to be so forlorn about the stupid rose-covered chair. I just don’t like changes, is all.

Interestingly, as we get older we seem to like change less and less. It’s oddly disorienting…leaves you feeling at loose ends, in a funny way. Something that shifts your environment, when you’re an old bat, makes you feel out of sorts, unhappy, restless.

Why? I don’t think it’s because your marbles are starting to slip out your ears and bounce down the road.

No.

As your options, slowly and imperceptibly, grow fewer, a change represents something that you may never be able to undo and that very well may not be to your advantage. Or to your taste. Many things that are for the best are not necessarily to one’s taste.

By and large, I could do without them — changes.