Sitting in my favorite thrifted chair this morning, I had an epiphany.

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My family has often said I have a “chair problem.”

They are not wrong.

I can walk into a thrift store with no intention of buying one and somehow hear an old chair whispering from across the room.

“Bring me home.”

They can be so persuasive.

There is just something about a good chair. The shape of it. The history of it. The idea that someone else once sat there with their morning coffee, talking with people they love, making plans, breaking up, resting their tired feet, reading an irresistible book. People have settled uncomfortably into their grief, their laughter, their ordinary Tuesday, in chairs. They hold a multitude of stories. They wait in corners. They pull up at birthday parties and holiday meals.  They comfort tired hearts who sit around the table after the funeral to reminisce. They make a room feel less like a space and more like a place to come home to.

But this morning, sitting in one of them, thinking how much I love that old chair, I started wondering if my love for these four-legged pieces has always been about more than simply their architecture.

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When I was a kid, everyone in our house had a specific seat at the table. Nobody else was supposed to sit there. It was understood. Sacred, even.

Arguments actually occurred between siblings sitting in someone else’s chair. If guests came over and accidentally sat in the wrong spot, we would quickly redirect them.

“Oh, that’s _______’s chair. You can sit here,” pointing them to another place at the table.

Every person had a personal seat in our house, like many homes, I’m sure.

At the dining table, my assigned landing place was on the bench that sat against the wall of our dining room surrounded by blue velvety wallpaper from the 70’s.

Not a chair. The bench. The chairs were reserved for the older members of our family and special guests.

And this is not a sad thing.

I loved that bench.

I still have it in my house today and sit in my assigned spot often, happily. There is comfort in the familiar. There is sweetness in a piece of furniture that has followed you through years and rooms and versions of yourself.

But now that I am older and have a little more say over the rooms I live in, I wonder if somewhere deep down, that little girl in me has been collecting chairs because she simply was ready for one of her own.

Something just for me.

A place to land.

A place to read.

A place to drink my tea.

A place to think and pray and remember who I am.

A space that was mine without explanation.

It’s funny what we carry forward without realizing it. The things ingrained in us that we choose without totally understanding the whys.

A bench.
A memory.
A habit.
A small ache we never named.
A quiet longing that turns into a house full of thrifted chairs.

I used to laugh when my family said I had a chair problem. I still do, because there is an enormous amount of chair evidence stacked against me.

But maybe it is not really a problem.

Maybe it is a story.

Maybe it is a little girl who grew up, found her own corners, made her own rooms, and wanted to have enough for everyone, guests, family and sometimes, strangers to have a seat at my table.  Places to feel welcome, held and rested.

Maybe every chair I have brought home has been less about needing more furniture and more about honoring the simple human desire to have a place.

A place to belong.
A place to rest.
A place that says, “This one is yours.”

And really, isn’t that what so much of life is about?

Finding the places, the people, the rooms, and the small sacred things that remind us we are allowed to take up space.

So yes, I may still have a chair problem.

But sitting here this morning, wrapped in the quiet, I think I finally understood it.

I was never just collecting chairs.

I was collecting places to come home to myself.