History and story in daily life

Recently I’ve become interested in the idea of story. I don’t know what prompted this, and I’m only pondering the idea in very broad strokes. I’m also becoming increasingly interested in how history plays a significant part in our lives.

We live in an older house. We also have a variety of furniture throughout our little bungalow, and occasionally I stop to think about where they came from and where they’ve been. This is a partial list of some things around the house.

Piano: Our piano is a 100 year old Tryber upright. My father bought it at an auction about three years ago. No one in the house played the piano; he bought it because he thought it was a beautiful piece of furniture. It is beautiful, much more ornate than most others, and the original ivory keys are in wonderful condition.

My father didn’t know when he bought it that it was previously owned by his sister’s good friend’s mother.

Headboard: My great-grandfather built two homes on a corner in Grand Island, Nebraska during the Depression. He and his wife — my great-grandmother who just died at 103 — lived on the main floor of one of the homes and rented the rest of the rooms out to make ends meet.

My great-grandmother lived in the house until the late 1980′s, and she kept the next door rental house into the early 1990′s. When the family sold the home, they took a wonderful old walnut headboard out of the basement. Somehow I ended up with it, and it’s now in our guest room.

Marble: I mentioned this in the recent Salvage and restore entry. The marble sitting on top of our coffee table in the living room also came from my great-grandfather’s rental house. My great-grandfather salvaged the marble (about 5 pieces) from a grand old hotel downtown. From what we understand, it was a urinal divider.

Bookshelves: Earlier this year I installed some bookshelves in our living room. I constructed the bookshelves almost entirely of salvaged pine boards from three old homes in town which I helped remodel.

Mirror base: A fundraising garage sale yielded an ornate “mantle” last year. The ladies running the garage sale told me it formerly served as the base for a large mirror sitting on the floor. I bought it for $10, tacked some plywood on the top and screwed it to the wall in our little sitting room. While I know very little of where it’s been and come from, the ornate carvings wonderfully betray the hand-made nature of the work and the style of the rusty old screws suggest it’s had a long life.

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