The way the story was told me to me was that my father would come in from farming his fields at night and while my mother would finish up supper and get it on the table, he would take me on his lap and together we would find the rhythm of the old rocking chair and enjoy one another’s company. And then one day he didn’t. I was four years old when he died in a car accident. I have no memory of him or those evenings in that rocking chair. But I have always wondered if something in me remembers and if that is why for as long as I can remember, I have had a desperate and almost compulsive need to rock.

Soon after his death, my mother sold most of our things and she and I moved off the farm, away from everything familiar that felt like home to either of us. She needed work and so we moved to another city, another state and another life. Our new “home” was a three room apartment – the best we could do while she got settled and found work. The story goes, though I have no memory to validate it, that I would sit for hours at a time, rocking back and forth and banging my head against the back of the couch which was against the wall –  irritating the neighbor whose apartment shared the wall. It seems some people have a very low tolerance for objects flying off shelves and pictures that won’t stay put on the walls. So my brother Irvin, who had come to help us settle in, said to my mother – “if you’re going to live here, the child needs a rocking chair” and went to a thrift shop and got me one.

I wish I had kept track of the rockers we have owned over the years. But I have no idea how many there have been, where most of them came from (thrift stores and maybe even a dumpster or two) or even what some them looked like. But I can tell  you what happened to each one of them.  I. Wore. Them .Out.

The first one I really remember was an orange, upholstered rocker. I think maybe my mother bought it new after we moved into our “real” house because the other one was literally falling apart and she assumed this one would be sturdier. Growing up, I watched TV from that chair, I read book after book in that chair,  I did homework in that chair, some nights I put myself to sleep in that chair and sometimes I rocked myself awake when I crawled out of bed for school. I rocked when I was sad and when I was happy and when I was trying to sort out life. Sometimes I just rocked and did nothing at all,  which perhaps was the best use of all. But eventually I broke it. It was what was called a platform rocker and what we learned soon after we bought it, which might have been good to figure out before we parted with our money, was that it is actually possible to break the chair off the platform. So every time one my brothers would come to visit,  he would somehow jerry-rig it up and it would be good to go. . . for a while. But then it would break again. Did I not understand, they wanted to know, that rocking was never intended to be an athletic activity? My mother actually ended up giving me that chair to take with me when Paul and I moved to Lawrence, Kansas.  I’m sure she was glad to be rid of it and I was delighted.

When I graduated from high school, my sister Minnie took me shopping for my graduation present. And I don’t remember whether it was her idea or mine, but we came home with a rocking chair. A black Boston rocker with red cushions.  I had that chair for 25 years and moved it to 14 different homes.  We replaced the cushions several times and when we couldn’t afford new ones we reupholstered the old ones – once with fabric from an  old crushed velvet stage curtain that a local high high school was throwing away.  I think everything in our house was covered with that stuff and if I’d known how to sew I would have made myself a dress of it  (think Scarlett O’hara in Gone With the Wind).  Even when I had other rockers scavenged from one place or another, I held on to that Boston Rocker until it finally just came unglued.  I rocked all six of my babies in that chair and if there was ever one thing that made a new house seem like home, it was this.

I remember when the Montgomery Wards in Champaign, Illinois, was selling big oak rockers for $50 a piece.  We bought two of them, figuring they would last forever.  I loved them and while I could certainly rock my way across a room in them,  they were never really that comfortable.

And there were others along the way. Collected from yard sales and  other people’s  junk piles, they fed my need. Eventually I learned that it is really more convenient to have a rocker in every room of the house  (no, there is not a rocking chair in my bathroom, but then again, if we enlarged the bath.

I think it was about 1992 that I discovered the Cadillac of the  industry:  the Glider!  Paul bought me one for Christmas that year and I was hooked. Rocking had never been so easy . . . so smooth. . . so effortless. . . so quiet. . .  so “glide-y”.  Rocking in one of these babies was the ultimate ride. And then the reality. While what I really wanted was a Cadillac, what I needed  was a jeep. It turns out gliders could be pretty fragile and not intended for the well-trained and competitive rocker.

When we built the new house in 2002, we bought a really well-made, sturdy, and expensive glider.  Made to last a lifetime (or so they said).  But over the years, it got squeakier and squeakier and much less glide-y  and then it began to thunk each time it moved. Paul tried to repair it but to no avail, and no amount of WD40 would silence it. It
seems I was just chewing up the mechanism.  He complained that he couldn’t hear the television over the noise of the rocker and I had to admit, it was time to trade it in. But that chair rocked lots of grandbabies and provided hundreds of hours of nurturing to my soul.

This last fall we set out to replace the rocker. We spent whole days visiting furniture stores and test-rocking chairs. “What are you looking for?”  Paul wanted to know.  “I’m not sure.  But I’ll know it when I see it.” And then one day we walked into a store and there it was.  The one. It is a chair-and-a-half in size. It is overstuffed and comfortable and not a recliner (I really don’t like recliners). It’s a glider but with an exposed mechanism that can be repaired. We  turned it upside down on the sales floor and looked at it from every angle until Paul was convinced it could be fixed when it broke.  We kicked the tires and picked out the upholstery and signed the papers and then waited for the delivery date. When it arrived, Paul knew before we even unwrapped the plastic that we had a problem. It was the right size, the right upholstery, the right everything except the most important thing -it wasn’t a rocker.  “Why would you even bother to make a chair like this that didn’t rock?” I demanded of the company. They made another one and long story short – I now have a rocking chair that I can sleep in if I want and that I can snuggle up with a grandbaby (or two) and that fills that need somewhere deep inside of me.  Life is good.

I don’t know where that need in me comes from:  but I do know that it’s as real as my need for the light and warmth of the sun,  the sound of the surf breaking against the shore, the beauty of creation and the assurance that I am known by the Creator.  Maybe it comes from a memory stored out of sight of the conscious mind; the memory of a little girl sitting in her father’s lap waiting for supper and enjoying his company.