A few weeks ago I went to an estate sale, more as a suburban archaeologist than a shopper (I’m running out of space). It really ended up being more like a trip to a museum than an archeological dig. The estate sale hosts flounced around in “outfits” with nametags and set up the merchandise like they were Chelsea gallerists. I poo-poo-ed their staging, done more to validate the outrageous prices than to give the objects their due.

At the entrance to the house were 2 tables, roughly nailed together boards painted white 50 years ago or so and sufficiently weathered to warrant tossing in the fireplace (except for the lead paint). They were labeled “Shabby Chic Tables” and priced at $250- each!! The true horror was that there was a “SOLD” sign on both of them and the sale had only been open a few hours.

They were the sort of furniture I would have picked out of a junk pile on the side of the road 30 years ago and set up in my collage studio where I celebrated the begrudgingly slow passing of time. It was really a rather revolutionary gesture to be a garbage picker in the Reagan Years. It was a defiant act against the ever-insistent American machine called: NEWness. Though the aesthetic always had a maudlin undertow, the action of collecting what was discarded was an embrasure of decay and the ultimate and timely death of all things and ideals. Heady, I know.

Then the term “shabby chic” was coined for such toss-a-ways. Did Martha Stewart have anything to do with it? I am not going to go into a history of recent Good Housekeeping decorating trends. I remember the sadistic articles though, recommending beating furniture with chains or leaving it out in the elements: everything your mother told you not to do with the furniture. Since that time every barn from Sedro-Wooley, Washington to New Lebanon , New York was plundered and purged of their history for the seekers…Of what? The past? A careful-careless sort of look?

I still really enjoy the beauty of aged and distressed objects and furniture. Rusty gears and weathered woods. Lichen covered trees and a mossy brick path. I feel comfortable with aging and the aged. Think good sharp cheddar.

But what about plastics?

I found these chairs on the side of the road nestling up to a rain sodden sofa from Ikea. And a corrugated cardboard sign with the liberating word “FREE” on it. Not much is free anymore. And I’m still a garbage picker when the picking are good. When I got them home Michael wrinkled his nose in silent disapproval. “ Not exactly shabby-chic, are they?” I acknowledged.

Or are they?

I’m not really sure what natural processes are at work on these very unnatural plastic chairs, a few, maybe 10 years old. Yet as I approached them with my camera they had the look of a lichen covered marble  headstone in a Victorian cemetery. Somehow this aging makes them seem more comfortable than the slippery new whiter-than-white plastic chairs we have. I think if I hold on to them long enough someone might even be able to get a few hundred dollars out of them at the estate sale after my death.