The order.

“Years and years and years ago” when Mom was still alive, I did what my mother had done and decided on solid black, spindleback wood chairs for her old dining table she’d given me. I wanted four chairs, and bought cheap, unfinished chairs and stained and lacquered them matt black. They are currently serving duty in my son’s dining room.

Our garage sale library chairs have been good, but they are too heavy to slide easily in and out at table. It was time, I decided, to get what I really wanted.

Anthropologie (see above) had chairs that looked right. Black. Spindles. Oak. I had a discount coupon. The coupon did not work, but I ordered the chairs anyway. I had not sat in them so I worried they might not be as comfortable as they looked.

They were beautiful and comfortable, apparently sturdy. We received only three, each with serious flaw—a cracked leg, a botched paint job, seat not fitting to the back legs. After a dozen emails and many phones calls, each with conflicting information and advice, the chairs are all returned, the lost one given up, the money refunded, and I have the option of ordering chairs “at any time in the future” with a 20% discount from Anthropologie. Probably not.

Then a desk I had saved for and ordered months ago arrived Tuesday and is stripy walnut like milk chocolate-colored teak. I wanted dark bittersweet black walnut swirls. Honestly, even the salesman recognized it was not what I wanted, and I think both of us hoped I would love it anyway. I don’t. I am a generation past and a generation too late for the Danish-teak-now-called-Midcentury-Modern aesthetic. I mostly did not like the style the first time around and have not warmed to its resurgence.

The desk will go back as well, and that is going to be an expensive return.

The disorder.

These are the concerns of affluence, I think, fussing over chairs and custom desks, as if they mattered. Money. I have tried to figure this out. I do love all this stuff, but lately we have been selling and giving things away, emptying closets and attic, and even my jewelry box. Most of my life I have accepted what came—furniture, people, jobs. Maybe that is a flaw in my character? A failure of common sense? Bad and good luck?

We have been shoveling out what came unbidden into our lives in order to trade up for things deliberately selected. Affluence again to have that choice. Entitlement.

What matters is that my husband and I go for our long beach walk each day, even when it’s raining. We sit at the table and share breakfast.

Spiders can hear human conversation, I am told. They know when we spot them working their way across the ceiling. They hear our alarm. They huddle down and accept our coming for them, or run for a crack in the ceiling.

Maybe I need to run away too?

We listen to and read the news and would rather worry about furniture.

Run away! Run away! Doctor Who shouts.

Yes, maybe that.

There is terrible news every day and no place to escape to. But we would like to escape from cruelty and willed ignorance and obsession over money, even our own.

Who needs a vacation?

I can count the days we have slept away from home during the past twenty years on my ten fingers. In 2003, Gary and I began calling a few hours in a daytrip to Portland our “vacation.” Since then we have had two nights in Orcas and one in Canada, two trips to Seattle and two nights at Nye Beach, a few nights with family in Portland (does that count if I have to cook?). Fifteen years and, okay, maybe we had a dozen nights away from home. More than ten nights in fifteen years. We talk about travel to Iceland and Ireland and Portugal. (I have always wanted to see Hagia Sophia and Crete.) Mostly we stay home and stare too much at our computers. Have we been investing in furniture in place of vacation?

We should try it the other way around. Or something.

Next week we will go for two nights without technology. When we come home, there will still be just two ancient chairs at the dining table, and that will be plenty for us. Perhaps the desk will have gone back to Portland by then, and I will continue to sit up in bed when I write.

In the mean time, vacations too are the concern of affluence. Give me time to think about that.

I’ll keep you posted.