Dear Furnished,
The couch on the porch is gone now. How did it come to be on the porch, I would ask myself- it is a marker, I believe, of white trashdom. It was one of only two sofas we had growing up. The first place I remember, a house; had two sofas. One was a dark blue, nearly a night blue, with orange and other, less indistinct colors of flowers on it. I think there was a red, a purple. It had a flounce, a ruffle at the bottom. The other couch was a bamboo armed thing, with a chair that matched, in a kind of bumpy green striped upholstery. Celery green, a pale gold, dun, and off white narrow stripes. I remember both of these fabrics, the feel, the look, with an intense fondness, even though the stripe was rather scratchy in a polyester way, and the floral was a canvasy twill that you couldn't call soft, either. I think maybe it was the closeness I am fond of. I could lie face down on these fabrics, I could turn and face the back cushion, I could pull my legs up under me on these fabrics. There was a snugness. Also, it was a place to be near other beings. A communal coziness, then.
There was a couch on my best friend's porch when I was growing up; it was astoundingly long, with orange and ochre flowers on cream; bordering on chintz in its exuberance. We would sleep there, on that couch, on hot nights.
*I think maybe I still hate that big house for being so needy.
I do not know what became of the dark blue floral, but the bamboo moved with us to the house I spent most of my childhood in, and when my parents moved to a bigger, newer, closer to town place with horrible carpet, wallpaper, and generally soulless spaces (a downsizing of charm, even as it upsized radically in every other way), the old sofa was given to me, because the new house's rooms demanded new, larger things.*
I had already been given an old couch, a kind of overly ornate carved oak thing from maybe 1910, that my Mom acquired in a lovely wine colored velvet, which she re-upholstered in carmine fabric with green and blue dashes running through it diagonally. After 6 or 7 years of that davenport, I gave it to a friend of my Mom's, and I bought a walnut stained old thing circa 1960. It came with gold-green fabric that cat claws snagged on sight. I had it re-covered in boat vinyl; a warm gray fake ostrich. It was an unusual kind of sectional: two identical halves; one with a right hand arm and the other with a left, two seats in each half. I liked to put our fuchsia painted coffee table into the corner position. Which is why, when I was given the bamboo couch, the only place it could go was the porch. Which was fine, because all we had for porch furniture was some collapsing wicker chairs, and a wooden rocker whose seat was giving way.
A handful of years ago, we put a respectable piece of 'outdoor furniture' on the porch where the outdoor couch had been; a beige sort of futon thing in sturdy fade-proof outdoor upholstery: if I didn't know it wasn't, I would call it a couch. It is bland, and purpose made for being on porches, and the stray cat sits on it when we aren't looking.
*I think maybe I still hate that big house for being so needy.
