Metanoia

The Dresser

          The Dresser

He stripped it and remade it, long ago. The outer shell of wood was an unvarnished faded shade of gray. Once it had a mirror, but that was long broken. The two top drawers curved, creating a beautiful bow front. One was complete while the other was a front for emptiness. The bottom and sides to the drawer were missing. If you pulled it open the space gaped like a wound, empty, useless, ugly. The two wide drawers beneath the bow were planed smooth. The bottom one slanted, making it difficult to close, leaving a dark sliver of an opening gradually wider from right to left. The other drawer had a perfect façade but when opened the bottom was revealed as cracked in half, leaving a large opening through which items could fall into the drawer beneath. The dresser was left over from the first year of their marriage.

He discovered it in a forgotten corner of a neighbor’s barn. Golden tones revealed beneath the worn finish made his fingers ache to liberate it from its cracked varnish. Expecting to uncover golden oak he was unashamedly disappointed to discover the swirling patterns were painted on plain pine boards. The soft pine lacked any clear definition, no stippled beauty to catch and hold the eye. Yet, the gentle tones of the wood were graceful, providing a soothing addition to their bedroom.

It had been years since he’d looked at it closely. Long ago he’d relegated it to a dusty, forlorn corner of the attic. Now, his wife had dragged it downstairs and out on the front porch into the cold sunlight of an autumn morning.
***

The dresser remained on their porch, an exclamatory punctuation to their lives. She passed it every morning, bruised her shins on its edges in her hurry to leave for work. He sat on the porch, pretending to be oblivious to its presence. Watching her go, he nursed his coffee, dredging every drop of warmth to ease the numbness glazing his heart.

The warmth of the late fall morning drew her onto the porch. She stood, alert, shivering in spite of the bright warmth of Indian summer. She stared into the depths of the empty blue sky, pressing down her thoughts. Irresistibly, her gaze sought the dresser, now shoved to one side. She lifted her hands as if to bestow a benediction on the worn, battered wood.

Instead, she roughly grasped each edge and dragged it, bumping coarsely down the porch steps. It crashed to the sidewalk. She pulled it to the curb. Turning her back, she returned to the porch. The sun warmed her as she strode past the now empty space. Inside the house, her husband lay sleeping in the bed they shared, dreaming of golden oak swirling beneath the caress of his fingers.