Wicker, etc.

I loved going to work with my mom.
I was in the 5 to 8 range, somewhere in that stretch of childhood where age stops mattering and memory just becomes smell and color instead. Her store was called Wicker, Etc. and I thought it was the prettiest place I had ever been. I can still tell you what it smelled like.

I never stopped loving wicker. As with most trends it went out of style for a while, and though I didn’t encounter it much, it was always a happy memory even if it wasn’t something I actually bought. In the past few years it has started showing back up again, slowly at first, and now it has become a movement, an explosion, honestly not unlike what my mom must have watched happen the first time around, back in the 70’s. I have been thrilled to see its return. Having been through this evolution before as wicker faded in and out of style, I approach it like most trends. I’m not buying tables and chairs and committing my whole house to that theme, but I am buying the pieces that make me happy. I have invested in multiple accents and accessories that I have sprinkled throughout my home, inside and outside, and I love them all.
Honestly though, wicker was never really about wicker. It’s about her.

My mom was a teacher for many years of my life. At a different point, she owned that first store while she was still married to my dad. That marriage ended after 20 years, and it could have gone a lot of ways from there… Mom chose up, she chose better not worse. She worked two jobs through most of my teenage years, one of those a second retail store which also had a slant to wicker, this one she’d built by herself, and somewhere in the middle of all of that, in her 40’s, newly divorced, exhausted in ways I didn’t fully understand until I was older, she decided to sit for the CPA exam. She studied like crazy. She passed it.

My own marriage ended after twenty years too. My career, thirty five years of it, ended about as abruptly as a thing can end. I’m still figuring out what choosing up actually looks like for me, still building it in real time, but I know that it’s possible, because I watched her do it. I didn’t fully appreciate what I was seeing back then but I was watching.

She’s eighty two now, and she’s still amazing, in a whole different set of ways than she was in her forties but amazing, nonetheless. That’s a story for another day…
Now, every time I add another cute piece of wicker to my growing collection, I’m not really decorating. I’m remembering the prettiest place I ever stood, and the woman who built it twice.

The article appears in this weeks version of Practical Luxury, The Edit. The Edit will be only be available via subscription beginning next week. If you enjoyed the article, I hope you will consider subscribing.