Summer Resolution: Sit in Lawn Chair

Twenty years ago, my friend Beth had a lovely lawn on her acreage outside of Iowa City. With her artist’s eye for home decor, she found the perfect pair of worn adirondack chairs to set on the rise in the landscape overlooking the fields. It was an ideal spot affording a view of both sunrise and sunset. During that era she and I were immersed in the joys and challenges of raising young children - diapers, feedings, playgroups and playgrounds. I had a similar diorama of chairs in our own small back yard. We both admired the serenity of our stagings, but neither of us ever sat in the chairs. They were like sets in a play we were planning to audition for.

I thought of her last weekend because I bought new adirondack chairs. Since moving to Marine from Iowa City 14 years ago, we’ve been using cheap plastic chairs from a September clearance. With a couple cans of spray paint I transformed them from a dull tan into a deep blue. But even a mild breeze  somersaulted them across the yard. In their second summer, they started cracking and breaking apart from all the gymnastics. The year after that, the paint turned chalky, and drying them off after a rain turned a rag bright blue. Last fall, I carried them down to the give-away station at the end of our driveway.

Now that my children are older, I have more time to sit in a lawn chair.  But habits die hard. Last weekend my daughter asked me what I had stopped to look at out the living room window.  “Oh, just admiring our beautiful new lawn chairs….don’t they look inviting?

Here is a favorite poet on vacant lawn chairs:

The Chairs That No One Sits In

BY BILLY COLLINS

"You see them on porches and on lawns

down by the lakeside,

usually arranged in pairs implying a couple

who might sit there and look out

at the water or the big shade trees.

The trouble is you never see anyone

sitting in these forlorn chairs

though at one time it must have seemed   

a good place to stop and do nothing for a while.

Sometimes there is a little table

between the chairs where no one   

is resting a glass or placing a book facedown.

It might be none of my business,

but it might be a good idea one day

for everyone who placed those vacant chairs

on a veranda or a dock to sit down in them

for the sake of remembering

whatever it was they thought deserved

to be viewed from two chairs   

side by side with a table in between.

The clouds are high and massive that day.

The woman looks up from her book.

The man takes a sip of his drink.

Then there is nothing but the sound of their looking,

the lapping of lake water, and a call of one bird

then another, cries of joy or warning—

it passes the time to wonder which."

I hope this summer finds you all enjoying the view from your lawn chairs. 

Juli Hagstrom is a realtor in the St. Croix Valley. You can reach her at JuliHagstrom@EdinaRealty.com