The Antique Emporium

We set out for Petaluma today to look for some farm chairs to go with our farm table, but first, we headed straight for Della Fattoria, the bakery/restaurant with wonderful farm food and gaudy but tasteful Italian decor. After polenta with poached eggs, we were ready to tackle the antique emporium. It is a collective with different displays from different owners within one big building, and I got totally distracted from the chair problem by the different displays and vignettes.

I loved the one with hundreds of old paintbrushes suspended from the ceiling and the one with a stolidly upright Remington typewriter, surrounded by various kinds of writing implements, postage scales and books. The display of antique watch faces was attractive, and at $4 each seemed at first like a good deal until I decided that it would take about 100 to make a good display.

We found two kinds of chairs with various pros and cons--perfect color and style, too wide, too unstable or just not quite right. I am a visual person and like to see the exact chair in the exact place where it is going to live, while OilMan, the numbers guy, insists on measuring every conceivable dimension (except for the one that turns out to be the crucial one). We measured everything, took pictures and resisted the offer to take them all home on approval.

I took one last picture before we left, of farm kitchen items because I liked the cheerful color and the odd juxtaposition of an airplane hanging from the ceiling. When we got home we measured and ruled out one set of chairs, and decided the other ones were too creaky to survive the bunch of teenage grandchildren we are expecting for Thanksgiving.

When I chose the farm kitchen picture for today, I realized there was a reason. The chair hanging above the table might be just right....