Once upon a time, in a land rather different from Texas, an artist fond of chairs (particularly red chairs) and enamored of trees (especially whimsical trees able to use their branches to tickle cobalt suns or pistachio moons) whiled away his days stitching creaky little chairs and graceful trees into tapestries of hillocks and roads.
One day, the artist posed his favorite chair and a favorite tree against the sweet, subtle glow of a marmelade sky. He posted a photograph of the painting at his blog, then posed a question to his readers. Would they be willing to compete for the honor of providing a suitable title for the painting before he took it off to meet the public?
His readers were willing, and some of you surely remember the events that followed. Cobwebbed and empty beneath its tree, the Red Chair evoked for me other seasons, other times. I remembered an aging chair tucked beneath an ordinary tree in my town’s historic graveyard, dappled by afternoon sunlight and shadowed by a falling night. I recalled spending warm summer afternoons engrossed in that slatted chair, imagining the lives of early pioneers and the Civil War soldiers buried nearby. Above all, I invented stories about the chair itself – how it had come to be there, how it had come to lean so comfortably against its own strongly-rooted companion. (more…)
