A Loveseat Lesson

“Your grandfather’s going to take that loveseat to the dump if you don’t take it first,” Gram told me, over the phone. “Do you want it?”

Gramp never did appreciate anything that was an antique. And now that his youngest son’s furniture was being moved into his house, he had no interest in keeping a Victorian loveseat.

Gram had kept it all those years because it had once belonged to her grandmother, Mary Grant (Ward) Spear, a Limestone, Maine, resident who was related at one time to half the town. 

The seat had sat for years in the corner of my grandparents’ dining room. I had played by that seat, sat on it, laid on it.

“I’ll take it,” I told Gram.

It sat in my parents' house for years, enjoyed by pet cats, visitors, family. Eventually, my parents had the seat reupholstered, and when I eventually moved, I took the seat with me.

After that, more cats slept on the seat, snuggling against the cushioned back. The honey-toned wood shone, despite its age, and the curved carvings continued to amaze visitors. “Surely this is hand-carved,” one person said. “Possibly a local wood…butternut?” 

In recent decades, children have again played and sat on the seat, giggled with friends, whispered secrets, cuddled cats, or fallen asleep when not feeling well. The chair has been loved by them all.

It's first owner was 12 years old when she moved to northern Maine in 1859. Her family cleared some of the virgin forest and started a farm.

Mary Ward certainly appreciated things and people. Her clothes, in the images that remain of her, were “just so.” Sometimes she would smile at the camera, when that was not common. She married Joseph Spear when she was about 18 and probably acquired the little loveseat at that time. She eventually had several children, 10 or more grandkids, and several great-grandkids before her death in 1927 at the age of 79.

“Mrs. Spear was never an old lady,” a local newspaper explained, “for she fully enjoyed youth and its interests.”

From chickens to children, fine clothes to bone china, flower gardens to well-made furniture, Mary Spear lived. And a bit of her zest for life lives on in the old loveseat which never really seems to grow old to those, who like Mary, know how to take the time to enjoy.