The Chair by the Window Is Never Used for Sitting Down Quickly

There is a wingback chair in the corner of our living room, upholstered in a faded green that was probably much brighter forty years ago, and it sits at an angle that catches the last hour of afternoon light almost perfectly. I never sit in it to check my phone or to rest for a minute between chores. That chair is reserved, without my ever having announced the rule out loud, for the twenty minutes or so near the end of most days when I actually stop.

It belonged to my grandmother’s sister, a woman I only knew as Aunt Ruth, and it made its way to me after a series of moves and one memorable argument between cousins about who should get which pieces of furniture. I did not fight very hard for it at the time. I mostly wanted it because it did not match anything else I owned, and something about that appealed to me. Now, decades later, it is the single piece of furniture in the house I would carry out first if I had to choose.

The specific slant of the afternoon

Around four in the afternoon, depending on the season, the sun comes low through the front window and lands directly across the seat of that chair. I have arranged my day, more or less without meaning to, around being near the living room at that hour. Some days it is only for a few minutes, if the day has been a demanding one. Other days I settle in for closer to half an hour, a book open on my lap that I may or may not actually read.

The light moves fast at that time of day. You can watch it crawl across the arm of the chair and up onto the wall behind if you sit still long enough, which is part of why I like being there for it. It reminds me, in a way that nothing else in my routine quite manages, that time is a physical thing passing through the room and not just a number on a clock.

I do not read in that chair so much as I let the light finish its trip across the room while I happen to be sitting nearby.

Why it has to be that chair

I have other comfortable places to sit. The couch is newer and softer, and there is a recliner in the den that my husband claims most evenings. But none of those chairs face the window at the angle Aunt Ruth’s chair does, and none of them carry the particular give in the cushion that decades of other people sitting down slowly have worn into it. When I lower myself into it, there is a specific sound the springs make, a low settling creak, and I have come to listen for it the way you might listen for a familiar voice.

My grandchildren, when they visit, are not allowed to jump on that chair the way they jump on the couch. I have never had to say this more than once to any of them. Something about the chair itself seems to communicate its own rules, its worn arms and its stiff formal posture suggesting that it is meant for a different kind of sitting than the sprawling collapse a child does after a long day of play.

What the twenty minutes actually holds

I would not call what happens in that chair meditation, exactly, though I know that word gets used for almost anything quiet these days. I do not close my eyes or count my breaths. Mostly I just sit, and let my hands rest in my lap, and watch the room change color as the light moves through it. Sometimes I think about the day that has just happened. Sometimes I think about nothing at all, which is rarer for me than I would like to admit and therefore more valuable when it happens.

The dog usually finds his way over during this time and settles at the foot of the chair, not asking for anything, just present. There is a particular kind of company in that, a dog lying quietly nearby while the light moves and the house is otherwise still. I have come to depend on those twenty minutes the way I depend on the kettle in the morning, a bookend on the other side of the day that tells me the demanding hours are behind me now, at least for today.

A chair that outlasts its owners

Aunt Ruth has been gone now for longer than I actually knew her, and I sometimes wonder, sitting in her chair while the light does its slow crawl across the room, whether she ever used it the same way. I never asked her while she was alive, and it did not occur to me to wonder about it until well after I had already made the chair part of my own late afternoons. There is something a little sad in that, not having asked, but also something comforting in imagining that maybe the chair has always done this kind of quiet work for whoever happened to be sitting in it at four in the afternoon.

When my own children are older and dividing up whatever furniture is left of mine, I do not know if any of them will want the green wingback chair. It is not the kind of piece people fight over anymore, not glossy or fashionable, just faded and a little too stiff in the back. But I hope one of them takes it anyway, and finds their own window for it to sit near, and lets it do for them what it has done for me and, I like to imagine, for Aunt Ruth before that.