I coveted it since I was a little girl, but until recently it had mostly served as the holder of
discarded clothing we were too tired or lazy to hang up right away. My mother had stored her grandmother’s rocking chair, clear of collected household debris, in my brothers’ childhood bedroom, long after they’d left home. It sat there, unused, next to the old-fashioned metal rocking horse set atop squeaky springs. Those two relics keeping company but rocking no more.
“Can I have it some day?” I asked my mother when I was maybe 9 or 10 — referring to the rocking chair not the horse. I felt, even then, it was meant to be mine, without being able to articulate why. She had had it “re-caned” she told me. I knew, given how short on money we were, that the chair must have been special to her to have invested so dearly in it.
The wood frame was stained dark brown and it glowed, worn on the arms, with an obvious repair to the front of the seat where a piece had broken off. Did she tell me then it was her grandmother’s? She must have. But we rarely talked about Mary Danisavage, my great grandmother. I knew she had raised my mother after she was abandoned, literally, by her own mother, and that my parents had lived with her when they were first married. I can’t ask my mother, gone almost 10 years, all the questions I have now.
(Dear readers, if you still have your parents, or lucky you, your grandparents, ask, ask, ask until you run out of breath and they run out of answers.)
Notes from my brother, the family genealogist, filled in a few more facts about Mary. She was born in Lithuania in about 1860 with the maiden name of Limontavage and married my great grandfather Joseph in 1880 in Waterbury, Connecticut. She lived there, raising her nine children, having lost the 10th shortly after birth. She died in 1955, 10 years before I was born.
I remember meeting some of my mother’s aunts over the years, all gone now, but the only remaining tie to my great grandmother besides the rocking chair is a black-and-white picture of her sitting in it. She is on her porch in a house dress, a light sweater over it, a hand resting in her lap. She is looking down at my mother, perhaps 7 or 8 years old, kneeling at a table nearby, who is reading or perhaps drawing, the faded picture-of-a-picture texted by my brother too unclear to know.
There’s so much I won’t ever know of the missing pieces of Mary’s long life that began in Eastern Europe and spanned two world wars and remarkable technological change.
But I feel her. In the rocking chair I now keep free of all but a small pillow, imagining Mary resting on it while she watches over me.
Virginia Buckingham is the former president of the Marblehead Current’s Board of Directors, former chief executive officer of the Massachusetts Port Authority, chief of staff to two Massachusetts governors, deputy editorial page editor for the Boston Herald and author of “On My Watch: A Memoir.”
