Favorite Places

There’s an old leather chair in our living room. I find myself in it most days. Mornings, maybe. Certainly evenings. It’s a good chair—big arms, worn in the right places, the skin’s oil has softened  and colored it over the many years.

Next to that chair is another. It’s a relatively new chair. Cloth. A beautiful color, a mellow gray. It has style, that chair. But it is not my chair to enjoy. It is not my wife’s. And it is rarely one for our guests.

That chair, nearly always protected now by an old brown blanket, is Sam’s chair. It didn’t happen by design. We didn’t coax Sam into this place. She found it all on her own. And as she rested there one quiet, early morning before the sun was up, I thought about how and why our favorite places become those places. Comfort. Position to the sun. The right light or warmth. I can’t ask Sam why this chair is her chair now. But it does sit at the big window where she loves to watch the world go by.

I wonder if we can ever really understand how we come upon our favorite places. I think it’s more complicated than we think. Yet maybe all we need to know is that that place, when we are in it, makes us feel just right.