Sunday, January 20, 2013

My Red Couch




My red couch was the first “grown up” furniture purchase I ever made. I was browsing a flea market in Wetumpka, Alabama and saw it sitting there with a price tag of $400. "Layaway" my friend Ashley said when I began to buckle at the price. We haggled the lady down to $350, and three payments later, in the dead of winter, my dad and I were headed to North Georgia with the couch loaded on the back of his pick up truck. It fit perfectly in my first non-roommate inhabited rental house, which came with my job at North Georgia College and State University in Dahlonega. The couch was my centerpiece for entertaining in my sparse beginnings as a single adult with a paycheck. I had parties, flirted with through-hikers and cried with girlfriends on that couch. I was sitting on that couch one Saturday afternoon when it hit me like a ton of bricks that I was falling in love with a bass player from Buford, Georgia.

When my job took me to Atlanta the couch got loaded with everything else and it followed me to every overpriced apartment that I occupied ­­– including the house in Decatur I eventually moved into with that bass player. When we got married we rented a house with a fireplace and hardwood floors, the perfect setting for my couch. But on the way into the front door the back foot was broken off, so we had to prop it up with my new husband’s old web design books. When the economy tanked he pulled those books out and used something else to prop up the foot while I worked and he went back to school to study graphic design. A few years later we had our first baby, Oliver, and as soon as he could walk he started pulling the stuffing out of the loose velvet upholstery. “You should just get rid of that thing,” my husband growled as we chased our son around the house to pry dusty cotton strands from his tiny grip. I wouldn’t hear of it. We moved again, had another baby, Isabel. For the past few months the couch has been parked in the garage of the house we finally bought, back up in those mountains where we first fell in love.

That bass player made good and became a creative director for a web company, while I stayed at home with the kids (he’s not a bad photographer either, he took the picture). The couch is now a home to our cats and lord knows what other creatures that venture into our garage in the dark Georgia night. Once, I found a raccoon poised on its two hind legs as if it were arriving for tea. But I am keeping this couch. It’s my flagship heirloom, not passed down from my grandmother’s grandmother but a symbol of my debut into responsibility. I plan on getting it stuffed, recovered, and the broken leg fixed. I plan to have many important talks with my kids on this couch about hard work, holding on and the importance of sitting still while you let the beauty of life wash over you. I hope it also stands as a reminder that it’s OK to take a chance and buy something on layaway every once in a while.

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