Mockingbird Hill Cottage

Today is our second rainy day in a row. I am missing the sun and there is just not enough light to take a good photo. So I thought I’d share something I already have a photo of – one of my favorite things. As always, there is a story behind it.

Back in my days as an underpaid college professor in Cambridge, I needed some furniture. I had recently moved to a rent-controlled apartment on Harvard Street, just down the street from Harvard University. All during graduate school and into my first year in Boston, I had lived in studio apartments. Tiny studio apartments. When my dear friend and colleague, Judith, called me and said there was a rent-controlled apartment opening up in her building (which I already loved), I jumped at the chance to have a bay window, a separate kitchen, a non-working fireplace and a big bedroom! I felt like I had died and gone to heaven! But I didn’t have much furniture and I certainly didn’t have much money.

But there was this funky shop in Cambridge with all sorts of used furniture and one day Judith and I and our friend Annette were there and I came across these chairs. They were library chairs from the Massachusetts Mutual Insurance Company. They had a beautiful, glossy finish with a metal tag on the back identifying them as belonging at one time to Mass Mutual. I bought 2 of them for what must have been next-to-nothing. I used them in my kitchen with a black ash kitchen table I had – I loved the contrast of the black with the mahogany of the chairs.

They have stayed with me all these years. A few years ago, they were moved to the storage shed because they no longer worked with our current kitchen table. (I’ve also used them as desk chairs.) Recently, I was doing some rearranging in our bedroom and the next thing I knew I was out in the shed rescuing one of them. Oh, I had missed them!

They’ve lived in Cambridge, 2 different locations in San Diego, Westchester County and now in our little cottage in the Hudson Valley. Do you have favorite things that have traveled with you from one house to another?