Aug 2, 2019 4 min read

The first furniture I ever owned was a mishmash of mismatched hand-me-downs. The sofa and chair were unsightly and threadbare in spots, and I was so proud to have it. When you are twenty-ish and in your own place, the fact that the sofa is ugly does not make the room less beautiful. At that stage in life, the beauty lies in the fact that you have the sofa at all.

After completing and sending off this column, I shall spend the day preparing an old and quite ugly sofa for its next home – the first apartment of the daughter of a co-worker. The graduate student had just signed a rental agreement and had come to the edit room to tell her father about it.

“Do you need furniture?” I asked. I’d just met her and maybe the request seemed a bit forward, but so what. “I can set you up.”

She said she did need furniture.

“Big sectional, overstuffed,” I said. “Sage green. Might smell a bit like a dog, but we’ll clean it up for you.”

Yes, she said. She’ll take it.

The sofa had served my family for years, its deep cushions holding all of us as we settled in on countless movie nights. In those first months, the dog was forbidden – a rule inspired by the delusion that we could keep the sofa in the same condition of its arrival. But then juice boxes would spill and pizza would flop there upside down, and finally we gave up the illusion and invited the dog to hop aboard.

When the farmer redid the den, we moved the sofa to the garage and ordered new stuff to match the brightened decor. There the green sectional sofa sat for the winter, the spring and into the summer, taking up space and blocking my pathway to the bike rack. I’ve had to lean my beloved bike against the lawn mower after every ride since April.

Soon we’ll have the space back. But first, I’d have to make the sofa presentable.

You don’t realize how massive an extra-large Pottery Barn sectional sofa is until you start stripping the cushions. They are nebulous bags filled with foam puffs the size and texture of marshmallows. When I removed the cushions from their covers, they inflated themselves as if someone had pulled the pin on a life raft, filling the garage with cumulous, billowing blobs. I ran out of places to set them. We’ve all seen the sitcom where the kid puts too much detergent in the washing machine, filling the room with foam? That’s my garage.

The covers are now a third the size of the cushions, and I haven’t even put them through the hot dryer. Worried that we will have to deliver the sofa with naked cushions, I did a trial run. It was like stuffing a queen mattress into a tube sock. I’m sure the factory has machines that decompress and push the cushions into the covers. Our garage, though, has no such tool (although in my time down there I learned we do own a cement mixer and two shop vacuums).

Soon as I finish this paragraph, I’m headed down there to do battle with the other 10 cushions: Wish me luck. After that I’ll give the sofa a once-over with a soapy cloth to remove the last of the dog.

And then off the sage-green sectional will go to its new home. I can picture the young lady lying on it, studying or maybe napping, and knowing the sofa may not be much, but it’s all hers.