The Rocking Chair

In my home, in the center of the living room, there sits a rocking chair. I placed it there, after my father died, because that's where it always sat when I was little. The chair had been in that spot even before there was a living room, back when all that was there was a one-room log cabin, back when we still hauled water from the river, and when warmed by the coals glowing in the stove, we'd sit at night and read, or talk in the soft light emanating from the lantern on the table, back before my father built rooms into the existing log frame, and before the extension for the dining room was added. Although the cabin has changed over the years, it has a warmth and character that can never be lost. It speaks of the men who built it, and it speaks of the women who cared for it. It speaks to me of both my heritage, and my legacy. Yes, the cabin has changed. It's now become a home - my home.
The rocking chair sat in the center of the cabin, next to the old cast iron stove. I still remember the sound it made as it rocked and creaked over the floorboards, boards that my father and my grandfather had cut and laid themselves. The cabin had been a post war project for my father. Fresh out of the army at twenty-one, he and my grandfather purchased the land that would become a part of my heritage. Together they felled the trees and peeled the logs that would make up the walls of our family gathering place. Pieces of the cabin came from everywhere. Many of the furnishings were from the old railway stations along the mountain lines, and each one had a story to tell. The iron framework beds and couches were covered in Indian and Hudson Bay blankets, and my father even brought up his old phonograph - you know, the kind with the crank on the side - and he played his big band, and old country 78s. On the shelf above the cabinet, there was a pair of stuffed ptarmigan that had been killed in a snow slide eighty years before. But my favorite thing in the whole cabin, besides that old chair, was the elk. The elk was a magnificent animal - a twelve pointer. He hung over the doorway to the cabin, barely fitting between the top of the doorframe and the peak of the rafters. He scared me to death, that old elk, but I always asked to be lifted up so that I could pet him and poke at his glass eyes with my fingers.
My grandfather and I would play for hours in the rocking chair. He'd stand up and pretend to stretch, or be doing something or other, so that I could sneak up and “steal” his chair. I remember squealing with delight when I was spotted, and the race to be the first to reach the chair began. These are the only real memories I have of my grandfather; he died when I was quite young, but they are memories that are full of warmth and happiness, memories that I hope will never leave me.
My father moved up to the cabin after he and my mother divorced, and I visited him often. I even moved in with him for a while. I rocked my first child to sleep in that old chair by the stove, and my second, and my third. Once, when I came to visit, the chair was nowhere in sight. When I asked my father what had happened to it, he told me that it had simply fallen apart. The leather coverings had rotted with age, and the wooden pegs that held the frame together had worn and snapped. He told me he had put it in the barn and said that he would fix it someday, when he had time. I asked my father where the chair had come from, and that's when I first learned the story of the chair.
It seems the chair didn't belong to my father, nor did it belong to my grandfather. The chair had come on a long journey across the ocean, on a ship with a hundred other immigrants. It came from England, along with my great grandfather, when he came here alone and orphaned at the age of thirteen, and had been handed down, through the generations, to my father. It belonged to no one, and it belonged to everyone, and there it was almost a hundred years later, lying broken in an old barn, waiting to be rocked again.
After my father died, while I was sorting through his belongings, I came upon a collection of Bibles and old photo albums that I'd never seen before. It was there, on the floor of the cabin with my father’s life strewn around me, that I met the original owner of the chair, my great grandfather’s father from England. I stared into his eyes and recognized him immediately. It was his warmth that I felt when I sat in that chair, and it was his kindness that had been handed down, along with the chair, and had filled my life.
The elk still hangs over the doorway, the ptarmigan sit high on a shelf, and the phonograph stands in the corner by the window. But now, in the new dining room, on a stand next to the old railway table, there lies a beautiful, antique photo album and a family Bible that's so old there's no publishing date in its pages. Although I'm not a religious person, I wrote my father’s name in that Bible, below his parents’ names, and I made a space for my own name to be added someday.
My father had found time to fix that old chair before he died, and it creaks and complains once more as it rocks over the same old floorboards, now covered with linoleum. It seems like it was only yesterday that I shared my grandfather’s laughter, as if it was just this morning that I heard my father’s voice, but I'm sure I'm mistaken. It must have been the sound of the chair.
Now I race my own granddaughter to the rocking chair, and I hold her in my arms, and laugh, and rock, and I remember all those who sat there before me. Like the ripples in a pond, each of our lives touches so many others, and I sometimes wonder: Whose life have I touched? Who will sit in this chair and remember me?