We had four sofas. The house we were vacating
had a living and family room allowing us such plentiful seating. We were giving up the family room for a fourth bedroom in this instance. So.....some of the seating had to go. We decided we could best part with what Rachael called the "Brady Bunch Sofa"...
This is the gold brocade sofa we got from a friend who had gotten it
from a doctor's wife who was very short. The sofa was made in
Pennsylvania Dutch country according to specifications. In other words,
it sits very low to the ground. The other interesting feature is the
sofa sits on wheels.
Rachael and I were up very late Friday night,
packing and move some of the unwanted stuff out onto the carport as we
are going to place them in a local paper for sale. Okay, after a very frustrating week
I admit to mixing a little Dickel in with my coke that night.....it really loosened me up.
Picture this, a typical residential neighborhood around 2am on a
Saturday morning....very quiet. Whap! The side door opens and out
sails this land yacht of a sofa onto the silent residential
streets....we begin wheeling it around front to the driveway.
"Mom, get on it and I'll push you."
"Don't be silly."
"No, really....I'll give you a ride."
I hop on and Zeus (our three and 1/2 month old Norwegian Elkhound)
immediately follows. Off we go. Except that Rachael does not push me
to the driveway. Instead she runs behind the sofa pushing it in the
opposite direction all the way up Lincoln Drive (which runs into my
street). We are laughing hysterically as we fly past Stinky's house
(the landlord), past Mr. Compton's house (Rachael's junior high
principal).
She collapses onto the sofa next to me, laughing. The moon is full. We
sit there in the middle of the street on our big sofa, silent.
Not one car turns onto the street. And of course, with my luck---if one
did; it would be a police car. We laugh about trying to explain it to
the cops.
We look back toward the house and see Mr. Mac's little red truck next
door.
"Mac, I'm so sorry! I hit your truck!" I say.
"No, not with my car....I hit it with my sofa!" Rachael adds.
"Your turn." I tell her and I get a running start and push her and Zeus
back to the house.
We start to smell something a lot like rubber
burning....I suspect it is the wheels on the sofa. Yep, we are burning
rubber now!
We push up the driveway and rest the sofa on the grass under the huge
tree in the front yard. The one with the two tiered flower bed around
it....the one with the lights around it....the one I spent so much time
caring for, raking up leaves around and providing food for it's
occupants(countless birds and thieving squirrels). It is perhaps the
feature I will miss most about this house.
We sit quietly on this big sofa, under this big tree gazing at the full
moon. I look at this house and think, it's not such a bad house.
Hopefully someone will buy it cheaply and have the good sense to replace
the carpet that was stolen from the Zion Baptist Temple by previous
tenants and badly laid. Hopefully someone will replace the aging
plumbing, fix the roof and gutters and maybe give it a fresh coat of
paint. Hopefully someone will love the backyard as much as I did and
maybe even put up a new fence and plant tomatoes back there next
summer.
The moon is so pretty. I wish I would have thought about putting a sofa
in the front yard, under the big tree, a long time ago.
