Vox Meditantis

Name the most expensive personal item you’ve ever purchased (not your home or car).

Sunday, 9th November 2025

Cost is a polite fiction until it isn’t – until the number carries a weight that rearranges the room, not because of what it buys, but because of what it says about what you mean to keep safe. Value, it turns out, is where money and intent shake hands without flinching.

Sunday behaved like a well‑brought‑up neighbour in New Corinth – weather doing its work without theatrics, the river tidily shouldering its errands, the town content to speak in lowercase. I kept to modest circuits: harbour path in the pale light, a hello from Tom that didn’t require me to stop, a cup from Marcus handed over with the easy competence of someone who knows when to add conversation and when to add milk. Elena tucked parsley into the bag as if it were punctuation and, later, Dan pressed a little essay into my pocket with a glance that said no hurry, only attention. Jenny’s text arrived like a librarian’s blessing – lists disguised as care – and I let the flat keep its quiet so tomorrow can carry what it must.

Tomorrow at nine I’ll sit beside Maggie at the long table at the Historical Society to consider an envelope newly accessioned, letters bearing my mother’s name in a hand we don’t yet recognise. There is no dignified way to make that feel smaller than it is, so I haven’t tried; I’ve simply set aside the hour and the kind of steadiness such reading requires. I keep seeing the seam between private tenderness and public record – not a line to be defended with rhetoric, but a threshold to be crossed with decent shoes and a good reason.

All day the mind circled a question about expense without quite landing, like a cautious bird testing whether a windowsill is invitation or trap. The truth is that the most costly thing I’ve bought for myself is a chair – plain if you don’t know what you’re looking at, made by a craftsperson who understood that arms can comfort without penning a person in. It sits at a modest angle to my own, neither adversarial nor conspiratorial, and I chose it because rooms declare their ethics before anyone speaks. I remember flinching at the invoice, then paying it with the particular relief of someone who has decided not to economise on welcome. I’ve spent years asking people to risk being seen in that room; the least I could do was ensure the furniture tells the truth first.

If this sounds like a loophole – professional purchase smuggled in as personal – so be it; the chair lives with me the way tools live with a musician, useful and intimate and accountable to care. I’ve oiled its wood on evenings when the harbour thickens with salt and damp, turned the cushion to even the stories it has carried, apologised to it once for setting a box on the arm in a hurry. It has outlasted three lamps, a rug that wouldn’t stop arguing with the rest of the room, and a fashion for seating that mistakes restraint for safety.

David laughs at me, gently, when I talk about chairs as if they were colleagues, but even he conceded, after that Thursday of music and washing up, that a seat can teach a person how to breathe. He sent a note this afternoon with a link about joinery that refuses disguise, and I found myself oddly comforted by the idea that repair can be allowed to show its face. It’s the same comfort I’m asking tomorrow’s table to grant: if the letters enter the town’s light, let the seams of their journey be visible and honest.

In the kitchen, the card in my mother’s hand remains where I left it – no altar, just a placeholder in the text of the day, a small vow to meet what comes without theatrics. The envelope at the Society feels less like a cliff and more like a door with a competent latch; the decision is not whether to open, but how to do it kindly and on whose behalf. If there is a season beginning, I won’t name it yet; anticipation does better work when it isn’t made to perform.

I walked the upper streets after dusk – the boards a little slick, the wind carrying the ferry’s tired horn – and counted preparations instead of outcomes: spare handkerchief in my bag, pencil sharpened, a sentence forming that starts with while reading. Father Walsh would call that prayer by other means; I call it logistics with manners. Either way, it steadies the ground beneath the table’s legs.

There are still the ordinary threads: Tuesday’s watercolour, which keeps teaching me that pigment punishes hurry; Thursday’s quiet hours, which are becoming less an experiment and more a promise; the guest room upstairs, which has stopped glaring and started waiting like a civilised queue. None of them demand a verdict tonight, and that is its own species of mercy.

As for expense and value: the chair was dear, yes – but cheaper than the cost of making a person earn comfort they were already brave to seek. Tomorrow, I’ll try to spend courage with the same thrift I bring to money: deliberately, with receipts if possible, and a record of why this, why now. Nine o’clock has a way of turning speculation into paper; I’ve laid out the pencil, and the harbour has laid out the morning.

Catherine

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Bob Lynn | © 2025 Vox Meditantis. All rights reserved.