Color Your World: Chestnut

This is a detail from a gorgeous antique sideboard that my dearest teaching widower and I bought way back in the days of disposable income.  We can pretend that the carvings represent chestnuts, no?

Here’s the backstory of this chestnut beauty and all our other belongings in 1983.  We hired a moving company to ship everything from San Francisco to North Carolina.  The driver and his wife, both quite short and slight of build, arrived with their gigantic van on its maiden voyage.  We were their very first clients!  My husband and I helped them as much as possible, hauling everything out to the yard for them to load into the van.  Hours later, as we drove off in the icy wind and fog, those novice movers still had ALL our possessions on the lawn, uncertain about how to best organize the load.  I didn’t know whether to laugh or cry.  It seemed a long shot that we would ever see any of  our belongings again.

What a shock!  Three weeks later, the van pulled up in Chapel Hill.  Not one item was broken or missing.  We helped them unload all of it, this time in the muggy heat of the south.  They were extremely reluctant to talk about their experience.  I often wonder about them.  Were we their first and last customers?  Did their marriage survive the vicissitudes of the moving business?  To this day, I appreciate their integrity and care.