Mending the chair

Every house has one chair that everybody sits on and nobody mends.

Ours is a kitchen chair with a rush seat that came with the house. It is the only chair you can sit on at the table without your knees touching the drawer, so everybody sits on it, and everybody has, at some point, felt it shift under them and decided not to mention it.

The trouble was the bottom rung at the back. It had worked loose from one leg, and the leg had begun to splay, and the whole chair had acquired a faint, apologetic lean, like a guest who has stayed too long and knows it.

Three winters

I knew it needed mending in the first winter. In the second, I bought the glue. In the third, I bought clamps, which I told myself was progress. Then one Saturday in August, with nobody home and rain on the windows, I turned the chair upside down on the kitchen table and looked at it properly for the first time.

It is a beautiful thing, upside down. You can see how it was made: every joint cut by hand, slightly differently, the marks of the chisel still in the corners. Whoever made it knew exactly what they were doing and didn’t mind showing it.

A conversation

The loose joint came apart with a few taps of the mallet. Inside was the old glue, brown and brittle as toffee, and a little sliver of wood somebody had pushed in decades ago to tighten it. I scraped it all out, cleaned the tenon, and glued it back with the clamps on overnight.

That’s all it was. An afternoon, a pot of glue and some patience I had been saving for three years.

What I hadn’t expected was how much I would like it. A repair is a conversation with whoever made the thing, and they have been waiting a long time to be asked. The chair stands straight now. Nobody has noticed, which is exactly right.