Joanna here,
I was lazing about on the porch the other day, not doing anything useful on a day I should have been doing something useful —
Although any day I should be doing something useful, I suppose. Somebody once said being a writer is like having homework for the rest of your life.
— but anyway, I thought how very much I enjoyed sitting in this spot in my bright red Adirondack chair.
I’m going to digress and say I buy plastic chairs even though I hate cheap imitations because
(a) a plastic chair costs about one tenth the price of a wooden Adirondack chair,
(b) I can lift and move plastic chairs and I cannot lift a hefty authentic wooded deck chair,
(c) plastic chairs are stackable so in the fall I can take five of them — which happens to be the number I own — and stack them up zip zip zip in a six by six corner of the screen porch and throw a tarp over them
instead of trying to find a six by sixteen space to store five wood chairs over the winter.
Although leaving them out under the snow is another possibility and I imagine that is what folks with authentic Adirondack chairs do.
They just leave their chairs out in the winds and weather.
Shivering.
(d)The plastic chairs have a slightly flimsy feeling when you sit in them, but they are not damp and cold which the wood version frequently is.
Where was I going with this?
Oh. Favorite chairs in favorite places.
Let me digress again and tell you the history of Adirondack chairs.
The Adirondacks are a mountain chain in upstate New York. Back at the end of the Nineteenth Century fashionable city dwellers in New York and Boston used to take the train to that neck of the woods and spend the hottest parts of the summer in the mountains. Fashionable outdoor furniture of a somewhat rustic nature was called for. The Adirondack chair became a classic.
Back to Favorite Places.
I have several spots scattered across the nearby towns. There are local restaurants that tolerate a writer typing away for hours. The sports bar. A coffee shop or two. (Yes. We have coffee shops, though not terribly close.) There is an oh-my-dear-heavens-this-is-healthy-food nook at the gym. There’s the library.
I have my favorite seats in all of them.
I feel happy and productive in these places. Sometimes, I am surrounded by beauty.
So I go to my favorite places and favorite chairs, like the Adirondack chairs at home. Sometimes I sits and thinks. Sometimes I sits and writes. Sometimes I just sits.
Do you have a favorite chair? Tell us about it. One lucky commentator will win one of my books. Your choice.