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Until I gave it away, I didn’t know that the mahogany china hutch was haunted. Varnished with a glistening chestnut brown, it loomed six and a half feet high in the dining room. For twenty years, it hunched over our meals like a black-headed vulture.
All I knew about the former owner, Eileen, my deceased mother-in-law, was that she had chosen this dining set sometime in the late 1950s. Eileen didn’t work because her husband didn’t want her to. She had few friends, and no activities aside from occasional ballet lessons. She was anxious and took Valium. Eileen only had the one child and a dog named Perky, who wasn’t. Here was an intelligent woman who apparently had no place but her home into which to pour her creativity. When I asked my husband to describe his mother, all he came up with was, “She was nervous.” One thing I did know, she liked imposing, dark furniture.
The china hutch and I did not get along. It was useful but darkly overbearing. Perhaps, I thought, if I sanded it down to the bare wood, and stained it, the hutch would cheer up. I bought a detail sander and some water-based stain. The project took hours and left my ears ringing from the buzzing of the sander. Red dust worked its way into every crevice, even into my nostrils, despite the mask.
Refinished, and stained a luminous blue pine green, the hutch still spilled its gloom over the dining area.
The newly refurbished hutch continued to shed its dreary presence. Or perhaps it was Eileen’s anger, not her gloomy sorrow, that oozed out of the wood. I could almost hear the hutch moan. One day at breakfast, I said, “You’re finished here.” I took some photos and posted them on Marketplace, asking $200 for the hutch. Considering all the work I’d put into it, and the beauty of the solid mahogany, I figured that was a reasonable price.
No one messaged about the hutch. At this point, I was determined to get rid of it, so I called the Restore at Habitat for Humanity. “No, we don’t take hutches,” the worker told me. “Nobody wants them.” The Salvation Army said no, too, because the hutch was over six feet high. At this point, I took desperate measures, and posted it for free on Facebook.
Suddenly, everyone wanted a free mahogany hutch. I texted “available” to the first messenger, a woman with an interesting name that sounded Indian. We messaged back and forth, and finally found a pickup time that worked.
When the couple finally found the correct driveway, the husband backed his large SUV up to our front steps. I asked if they were from India or Pakistan. “Sri Lanka,” the woman answered. These two sweet people didn’t know much about moving furniture. Eventually they wrangled the two heavy pieces into their car.
“I have two requests,” I told them. “One, love this piece as much as my mother-in-law did. And two, please don’t paint it. If you must change the color, sand it down and restain it. The wood is exquisitely beautiful.”
“Oh, I love this color,” the woman assured me. “It goes perfectly with our dining room.”
After their taillights turned away, I stood in the hutch-less dining area. The atmosphere felt light and fluid and free. OK, part of the feeling came from within me, but there was also a sense that the house breathed a sigh of relief. Eileen’s spirit had resided the hutch. Her frustrations and anxieties seeped out of the wood, like sticky sap from a pine tree.
The dining table and chairs and I shared a moment of pure liberation. The haunted hutch was gone.
Tangled Magic 