Joanne McNeill: Ephemera survives as treasures vanish

The sturdy four-legged household stool is freshly resplendent; legs painted bright yellow and the seat upholstered strident Hawaiian blue with white frangipani.

The makeover was part of customary spring cleaning. Turquoise and pink was so last year.

I can't remember every colour and pattern the stool has sported since I bought it in 1969 on leaving home to go flatting.

Definitely it went through a pin-striped and black period.

When I bought it - from a Christchurch op-shop in a job lot with a white cane chair (and delivery!) for the princely sum of $1.20 - it was brown with the unlovely, murky red, plastic seat cover which resurfaces annually.

For more than 40 years it has done time as a TV dinner table, a studio sawhorse, perfect seating for guitarists (no arms in the way), reserve dining chair, and the only reliable go-to stool strong enough to stand on for pruning grapevines, painting walls, changing light bulbs, reaching the top shelf of the bookcase, fetching Christmas decorations and cleaning windows.

The cane chair, a far groovier decor item, survived a large, famous painter who, having consumed a quantity of sherry while ensconced in the chair's embrace, became stuck fast and had to be popped out like a cork.

Finally it went feral and disappeared into the Northland's undergrowth in about 1983. The painter has long gone, too. Even Christchurch is an unrecognisable rubble-strewn desert.

The stool has seen off all manner of seemingly far more significant items; beloved vehicles driven to their legal limits; precious jewellery and objets d'art lost or broken, stoves burnt out, fridges with hunks of ice growing on the outside, washing machines that blew up just when you thought nothing else could go wrong; trees planted, grown to 30 metres, felled and burnt; and entire wardrobes of dresses, boots and shoes; not to mention beloved homes left behind forever.

Unaccountably it's a veteran.

Of family hubbub when children (now grown-ups with their own furniture) used it to build huts, reach forbidden fruit, or the bench to help with baking in days when tins were always full.

Of gatherings of friends now scattered across the planet, of marriages, and of passing jugglers of hearts, and of other sideshows which seemed like certainties at the time.

Spring cleaning revealed more unlikely survivors. Shards from Mum's second-best dinner-set in 1966 at the back of the potting shed; old holey, diesel-, semen- and seawater-soaked blankets off the boat which somehow did not end up overboard; and moth-eaten tickets to a 1988 circus (with elephants, chimpanzees and a flying trapeze) from the back of the desk's top drawer.

Nothing lasts forever, but the persistence of comparatively peripheral, seemingly insignificant, random, inanimate objects while many other more valuable treasures - such as fragile flesh and blood, and fleeting time and place - vanish into the ether, seems incredible.

Gladly I'd trade the stool for any of the interim losses, yet here it still is; all dressed up in sunny new livery, ready to face an unknown future as sturdily as ever.