My Mother's Chairs Emptying the attic of my mother's house, passed to her from many generations of the female line, I pack away their objects and furniture. I remember all of those women, known to me in life or from stories. I think of them in their youth - the mother who was a musical comedy dancer, the grandmother who left her husband in 1925 and progressed from Reno to Hollywood where she designed movie sets for silent films, the great grandmother who was a model of Victorian society but stoically unhappy in marriage, the great-great grandmother who was born and married there, a child of the first family.