A Rocking Chair for Granny

A few weeks after Hurricane Katrina hit the Gulf coast, the Texas school where I teach and my church were collecting furniture and other household items for a family from Louisiana that had lost everything. I thought of how sad it would be to lose all of the things in my house that held so many priceless memories. Nothing could ever really replace a memory. I prayed I would be able to help the Louisiana family in some small way. At least give them practical things they could use.

I had a couple of old chairs in the house, and went into the spare bedroom to dig them out. Then I saw the wooden rocking chair in the corner. Deep brown, with a unique pattern of fruits and leaves stenciled in gold on the back. I’d never seen another like it. I used to rock my son to sleep in it when he was a baby. Talk about memories! I could never bear to part with that rocker.

But a feeling suddenly swept over me. Give it away.

“Do you really want to do this?” my husband asked, helping me load the rocking chair into our SUV. “Doesn’t it hold sentimental value for you?”
I couldn’t explain it. “I just feel like I have to,” I told him.

I took the rocker to the school the next day. The woman in charge of the donations for the Louisiana family loaded it into the back of her truck. I hated to see the rocking chair go, but at the same time, I knew somehow that it was the right thing to do.

The very next day at school, the woman in charge came rushing into my classroom. “Angie, I have to tell you a story about that rocking chair!” she said.

The family was grateful for every single item we’d donated, they told her. Then they saw the rocker. Everyone stopped and stared. Then the granddaughter cried out, “Grandma, look! It’s your rocking chair!”

The fruits and leaves, stenciled in gold, the dark-brown wood. My rocking chair was exactly like the one they had lost in the hurricane. The one that held their sweetest memories.