Growing up, my living room consisted of a cramped collection of four key chairs: one Blue Armchair, one Rocking Chair, one Red Floral Couch, and a Checkered Maroon Wingback Chair. As the years went on, these key four spread out throughout the bigger house we moved into. Then the chairs went out of style—or even more out of style than they were before—and went into storage or under a slip cover.
I had forgotten about them, even though I had been sitting on Slip-Covered Checkered Maroon Wingback Chair every day in my studio since I was eighteen.
Last month, I started a Commission With An Impending Deadline that required me to do some rearranging in my studio. It’s a big commission, one that should be Incredibly Fun but has turned into something I’m often Anxious about. It’s messy, it requires spoonfuls of baking soda and lots of mixing house paints, and it’s a big jump of commission size and Importance because it’s for a Gallery Space.
I rolled up my studio rug, covered my floors in painter’s drop cloths, and then looked around. My studio chair is Very White—like the kind of white no one wants to sit on because it’s just so Very White—and I thought about it covered in accidental greens and yellows…
So I took off the slip cover, and cheered.
“Hello, old friend!” I said out loud, eyebrows raised in surprise and delight. This whole time, this Very White Chair was the Checkered Maroon Wingback Chair of my childhood! The one I would jump on and throw sticky darts at our world map to see where I would travel some day! The one I would take the cushion off for playing Jungle Forts and Dog Adoption Day! The one I used to think was probably made to be An Eternal and Extremely Difficult Checkers Game for Experts! The one that always had yogurt cups tucked into its corners!
It was here this whole time!
I stood on the chair cushion just to make sure. Yes, yes indeed. This still had some spring to it. I tossed a paper crumb at the map in my room. Yes, the chair still speaketh. I now have to head to Idaho.
I got down, my Commission With An Impending Deadline now forgotten. I felt the need to celebrate like that one parable with that Lost Coin Lady. The lost has been found! Cook a fat goose! Or a fat cow! Or whatever Lost Coin Lady cooked! I had rediscovered the Checkered Maroon Wingback Chair that meant safety and adventure and Endless Imaginative Possibilities to me as a child—and it was right underneath me this whole time!
Hypothesis: the chairs that we sit on affect how we work, and how we play, and how we rest, and how we interact with a room. Evidence: my sister’s boyfriend, after the revelation that the couch he was sitting on was not Tan as the slip cover suggested, but Red and Floral, was struck speechless. He sits on it more gingerly now, knowing it’s a Floral Relic. My two best friends used to have a Pink Toilet at their old apartment. I now work longer hours in my studio than before the Checkered Maroon Wingback Chair was revealed to be Maroon and Checkered. I am citing my sources because what if the seats we sit on become part of our identity, our personality, or part of our Possible Imaginative Landscape? What if?
What if I am different person when I’m in different chairs?
Maybe now I’m overanalyzing it, but it’s almost like I’m not under the pressure to not spill on the Very White Chair, so I’m not as anxious while I create, so I make better work, so I have more free time, so I’m a More Fulfilled Earthling at the end of the day. So I am a different person now, than what I was before the Checkered Maroon Wingback Chair.
Because I took a slip cover off it, and what I saw was an Old Familiar Pattern, and the Gabbie that jumped on its cushions and cheered about her randomized dart chosen Future in Snålkuk.
Or, perhaps now, Idaho.

Gabrielle Eisma graduated Calvin with a BFA in studio art and writing in 2022. She’s from Grand Rapids, Michigan, where she now works as a writer and illustrator for books for (mostly) children and middle grade readers.
This made me smile!
Pack it up, road trip to Idaho!
I LOVE THAT CHAIR!!!! Bring back the florals too!!!
Let’s go on a giant family road trip! What book shall we listen to?!
Thanks for the great article!
Delightful! Your hypothesis warrants exploration—I am very fond of a blue wingback chair I got from the side of the road and spend my most productive hours in. Thanks for the great read!