If there were a Couch Protective Services, my husband and I would have lost custody of ours decades ago.

 

Our settee was attractive enough when we first bought it second-hand.  At that point in our furniture acquiring career we were thrilled to own anything that wasn’t made of Herculon, Orlon, rayon or any other kind of man-made substance ending in “-on,” guaranteed to be so itchy, it made short work of your ability to sit on it.        

 

Though the chaise lounge was rather large and unwieldy we made a place for it amongst the prized possessions of our living room at the time which consisted of one framed print from the movie “From Here to Eternity,” our thirteen-inch black and white television set and our garage sale, though real wood, nineteen-sixties-era coffee table.

 

The divan looked divine and seemed to fit right in, which was no mean feat with our mish-mash of collectibles.  Unfortunately, what started out as an exciting relationship soon went the direction that many relationships go – from exhilaration, to apathy, to feelings of enmity.

 

We soon wanted a new couch and were condemning the old one for not being all that we had hoped and needed it to be.  The suffering sofa was never good enough, no matter how hard it tried.  It let us throw ourselves on it, spill every manner of liquid on it, jump on it, flop on it and even lounge on it and still, for us, it wasn’t doing enough.  We wanted it to be a conversation piece, the center of attraction, a piece of furniture that would go down in tufted history.

 

We wanted people to comment on our lovely davenport.  It never could live up to our standards because they were cruel and unrealistic.  We wanted another couch and we even talked about that fact in front of our much maligned settee with reckless disregard for its well-upholstered feelings.

 

As often happens, one day the light metaphorically went on for us.  We had just returned from looking at other chesterfields and the family couldn’t agree on any of the ones we had examined. We considered couches that ran the gamut from conversational pit style to “sink into it up to your neck,” to a spare, clean, modern little number, but none suited us.

 

At the end of a long day of paying homage to the furniture gods we finally came to the correct conclusion.  None of them were our couch.  We loved our couch.  It put up with us.  The more we dished out, the more it took.  It even stayed for more.

 

The lounge endured our insensitive comments about it, bad habits in all manner of sleeping, eating, sitting, and lying down and even our lackadaisical attitude toward cleaning.  In short, it acted like part of the family.

 

All I can say is that it’s a good thing our ownership of things isn’t subject to the same laws that govern our children because we’d be in big trouble with the law.  We’d be hauled in by the Couch Police faster than you can say, “Lay down the slipcover and get your hands up in the air.”