When I was 5, my parents bought matching chests of drawers for the bedroom my brother and I shared. The bedroom was in a modest, newly built tract house in what was then suburban Billings. It had three bedrooms (my sister got her own room) and a basement. I assume my parents felt optimistic about their future when they decided on the walnut-brown, modern-styled pair for the first home they owned. I am confident in my memory of the chest having five drawers. Each was of equal width but varying heights, shallower to deeper as they descended.

While my newly acquired casegood mattered to me, I continued to have thoughts about the oddly modified one I had always known and used, which now was relegated for odds-and-ends storage in the basement. I don’t know how the now second-tier chest came to have its legs cut and replaced with much-too-tall, bent-wire ones. Or why it was painted a muddy gray-blue, made even more impure by a black-tinted varnish.

I recall wanting to ask my parents if I could swap out my first chest for its newly installed replacement, now standing next to my brother’s matching one in our small room. But as my lifelong journey of rejection by my father was already well underway, I didn’t want to stick my neck out over a chest of drawers. At least not yet.

We left Billings two years later. First for Casper, then Anchorage, and ultimately Denver, living in three-bedroom rentals in each city. My parents must have felt they could grow roots in Denver, as they built a four-bedroom house there.

That was a big deal for me for many reasons, including that I got my own room. I remained in that room until I left home, six years later. That room was the early laboratory for what I would do for the rest of my life.

Now with separate rooms (I got the smaller one), it was determined my brother was to get both chests of drawers. This was a positive development for me because I had by then learned not to get monogamous with any piece of furniture, especially with a mass-produced dullish brown chest of drawers. Especially if my brother had a matching one.

With the chest now my brother’s, my parents offered to buy me a suite of bedroom furniture. This significant event was to happen at Levitz, a now gone warehouse chain on the other side of Denver from our new home. It was a big deal for me to be taken on a furniture-store expedition, but I had reservations about that store even before we went. I knew there was better furniture and better places to acquire it: furniture with a past, for sale as second-hand goods.

I knew such furniture from my grandparents’ house and from my mother’s bridge group friend, who had an antique store. In the cavernous Levitz, my parents led me around the teens’ bedroom department, bewildered, I assume—but not surprised—by the precocious furniture evaluation skills of their 12-year-old son. Nothing was purchased that day.

Immediately I came up with a much improved plan to find the needed bedroom furniture. I pored over the want ads in The Denver Post, and begged my parents to drive me to see a piece of furniture I had called about. While I’m sure my father gave me askance looks the entire time, the outing was successful. We brought home a mission-style oak chest with a drop-front writing surface. It had long ago been painted in a homespun chinoiserie style, orangish-red with black accents. The two-in-one aspect of the piece was a bonus, but I knew I was going to need more furniture soon. I needed more drawers.

To me there are just two categories of furniture: furniture to place objects on or in, or furniture someone sits or lies on, or in. Of course it matters a lot how the bits and pieces of any chair or table are shaped and joined, but that doesn’t change that there are only two categories. This means a table and a chest of drawers are closely related, while a bed is a bit different. It’s important to keep in mind that, while related, a table is about an object being on it, while a chest of drawers allows for objects to be both on and in it.

Years later, when I designed my first production chest of drawers, I was focused on insisting that the user consider the items they sat on top of it. My simple way of making the user of the chest  notice placing something on top of it was to add an unavoidable, perhaps awkward, small shelf. But at that time I also made a very few one-of-a-kind chests that were meant to have a user notice their action of putting something inside them. I did that with drawer interventions.

As my newly found furniture success was growing, I found my heart impacted by a sweet housepainter I met at a bar on Santa Monica Boulevard. The situation was complicated by John having both a girlfriend and a drug problem. Nonetheless, my heart did what it wanted: I made a chest of drawers about John.

One drawer of this largish chest of drawers was at the height of John’s chest, which I had measured one night. On the face of that drawer was carved a smooth, concave shape, like the one on John’s chest. It was an oval of sorts, perhaps more an egg-ish shape, with its pointy side down. And while other drawers on the chest had knobs, that drawer did not.

Instead, to open it, one had to reach through a slot in the stretcher below the drawer onto the back of the drawer face. One would then pull the drawer open from the inside. While doing this, one’s hand touched another smooth carving on the inside. It felt to be the convex back side of the carving on the front.

When Anne and I decided to end our working relationship with the furniture company we started together, I happily gave her that chest of drawers. I knew it was safe with her.

Many years later, Anne and her husband Bob’s second home, where that chest was housed, burned to the ground, incinerating everything in it. The day after the fire, Mike and I sat around the kitchen table of Anne and Bob’s main house, struggling to help Anne find a way through the loss that engulfed her.

A small reason I was at the table was to assign dollar values for the chest of drawers and other items of my making that were now ashes. Sitting next to Bob, I felt that he was constructing a fort out of insurance claims. And the sooner that fort was complete, the safer Anne would be.

Anne’s loss was vast and dark. It broke her heart. I understood deep in my gut there was no space for the minor loss I was feeling for that chest of drawers, so it went unmentioned.

Nonetheless, I found myself then—and now, as I write this—imagining moving my hand up into the back of the drawer face and touching the shape inside. I pull the drawer open to look inside. I see something. But at the same time, I am placing something into the drawer. Then, from the outside, I push the drawer shut.

One cold weekend in Fremont, Mike and I went looking for something in a store we hadn’t noticed before. The two green chests stood not far from each other. They caught my eye immediately. They were each painted a slightly different shade of the same green, perhaps described as jade, or 1960s elementary school hallway. One had better-for-wear original paint. The other a warm sienna stain showing from under the layer of added-later green paint. I read woodworking well, therefore l knew they were built at small woodshops, not mass-produced. They were not expensive.

As we snugly fit the two chests into our white Passat wagon, I told Mike of my feeling of a small, but important, good fortune and well-being, having found the two of them, together. With his always present good and willing cheer, he added that it was especially great to have them so they could join our dozen, or so, other, mostly empty, chests of drawers.