We are mostly settled into the bungalow over here. As much as my instinct was to settle in at a turtle-like speed, the boys I live with insisted we be done with it already. Mike did his insisting with patient but clear language. Luke has done his insisting by attempting to use the power drill as a toy. Because the bungalow isn’t much bigger than our Brooklyn apartment, we didn’t need much new furniture. Actually, we shed a lot of furniture before the move and are enjoying being surrounded by a few things we really love. Like the blue chair in our living room. I love our blue chair so very much- in part because of the color and the design, but mostly because of the story of how the chair came to us. Here it is:
Two summers ago Mike and I were trying to get pregnant. I was young, healthy and had been actively, at times obsessively, trying to not get pregnant for most of my adult life. So I assumed that the minute I did try to get pregnant, I would. As it turns out, nature has its own timeline and it took a bit longer than I’d hoped. One night, to cheer myself up, I made us last minute dinner reservations at a fancy sushi restaurant in the West Village called Sushi Nakazawa. And because I wasn’t pregnant, I also got drunk on sake. I think I may have even smoked a cigarette for the first and last time in that decade. I was really showing my body who was boss.
So after consuming so much raw fish, booze and nicotine, we did what all wild youth do on a bender: we went to West Elm in Chelsea. I have hazy but happy memories of sinking into chair after expensive chair, giggling at Mike from across the store as he did the same. They were all well out of our price range and it was so scandalous. We were about to leave when we discovered that one of those fancy-pants chairs had a bright yellow sticker. A SALE STICKER! It was a floor model that had already hosted countless butts and they were selling it for some price that was probably still a bit too much for us but seemed like a real deal at the time.
And that, my friends, is how we acquired our blue chair. I got pregnant soon after and our days of expensive sushi and West Elm purchases were put on pause. It is a chair that reaches out to us from before we were parents. A reminder of impulsive summer nights and New York City streets. A physical memento of what we can and can’t control and the joy that can be found in unexpected moments. Like this one:
Brownstone to Bungalow 