Lately, with all this American political intensity, I'm antsy. I'm also not alone in this, and like others, I need distractions, especially ones that take bursts of energy to do something positive in the world or at least in my living room.
That's why, after some years of looking for a replacement couch for the 13-year-old found-in-a-thrift store sofa that cats scratched and kids used as a trampoline, I got a couch cover. It turned out to be hideous, something Ken and I discovered after we stretched it on, stuffing a very big and heavy couch into stretchy polyester gray material. So I pulled off the cover. Then went to the basement to get a book, not realizing I was shopping in my own home.
What I quickly beheld was a couch I found on a curb some 16 years ago on my way to pick up Natalie from high school. I pulled alongside the great white buffalo of a floral couch in pristine condition although it was already 8 years old by then. With the spontaneous help of a few sorority girls out for a run, a gentleman with silver hair and abs of steel, and a young mother, who parked her stroller to help, I got it on top of the minivan I was rocking at the time.
Natalie was thoroughly humiliated to have her mother pick up her with a massive couch bungie-corded to the top of the van, but in her defense, she was only 16 at the time. We drove home, and I got her and her brothers to help me drag into the basement as the replacement for a falling-apart futon couch they have been using for playing hours of video games. I didn't give it a second thought although I knew it was a primo find.
That was until I happened upon the couch in the basement the other day, realizing two amazing things: 1) The 25-year-old couch was still in excellent condition, and 2) It matched the two padded chairs in our living room that I found at a consignment store in 2019. I mean, what are the chances? So now -- although my arms are still sore from the couch relocation intensive (even with Ken and Daniel helping), for the first time in my life, I have a matching living room set.
This made me start to think about the stories of other pieces of furniture in my house, all of which -- with the exception of a few Ikea pieces (a night table, bed frame, and shelf) migrated off curbs, near dumpsters, or from the back corners of thrift or consignment stores to our place. Each has a story I know and obviously many more tales I'll never know.
Take, for example, the small side table in our bedroom, holding books on top of a swinging shelf of old journals. My friend Denise gave this to me as she was moving, telling me the story of how her uncle made this decades earlier for her mother.
In what we call "the boys' room," although the boys are now men long gone, there's both a a hutch I snagged at a yard sale, the seller telling me how her dad made this one winter when he was feeling down. There's also a triangularly-shaped antique shelf full of porcelain Jacqueline B. Smith Woodland Surprises baby animals -- all from my mother-in-law, who loved collecting delicate animal collections.
Our home is filled with other reminders of the dearly departed: a rocking chair from Ken's best friend from childhood, John. A bookshelf from our beloved friend Jerry. A piano made in Lawrence over 100 years ago that we painted purple from Ken's grandmother Forest Elizabeth. Even our bedroom sports reminders of those who came before us: our two small and simple pine dressers, one taller and one wider, were part of the bedroom set Ken's paternal grandparents got as a wedding gift in 1922.
Walking through my house, I wasn't too surprised to see that there isn't any actual new furniture except for one shelf, stuffed into a closet and used for art supplies, a freebie from Nebraska Furniture Mart when we bought a very cheap and short-lived bedroom set for our youngest son. We ended giving the set to a family of five in a trailer court, the 4-year-old jumping up and down in pure joy because she would have her own bed.
Decades ago, setting up a house with more than cinder blocks and boards, I longed for beautiful, new furniture. But I had married a man who scoffed at anything not hauled home for free or nearly free. "There too much stuff in the world piled up in landfills," he would remind me, plus he built a powerful case about energy expenditures wasted on consumerism. He didn't sell me on the charm and power of adopting chairs, tables, bed frames, and many more furnishings with fabled lives already.
It's like the quilts I find in small group thrift stores: each square and stitch is imbued with the energy of whoever made it. Years ago, I bought a quilt at a garage sale from a woman who told me her grandmother had made this out of flour sacks on particularly cold winter in the Depression as a way to survive the loss of her baby. Likewise, there are objects all over my house made with great joy and hope.
I look around and think of my friends and family who have passed on and I think of those I didn't know who used their hands to make a kitchen table or oak desk. There's even repurposed pieces, like a very large, heavy door I made into a sewing desk (balanced on two filing shelves), and I wonder where this door lived and what its life was between one room and another in a house near or far.
The furniture doesn't speak my language but it brings into this home the grain and texture of its life and the lives of others, and for that I'm grateful to cohabitate with it.
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