covid notes 30

In April, a friend texted a photo of a couch she was getting rid of to a bunch of us neighborly gal pals.

 

Tim and I had a sleeper sofa we bought in the late 1980s—our first big furniture purchase. I loved it. But after thirty-plus years, it was worn out, and so are we. We need a little more support for these aging bodies when we relax in front of the TV.

 

Ours was queen sized with a Sealy mattress and iron supports. It was a heavy motherfucker.

 

We had been wanting to replace our sofa, but I didn’t want to order anything without sitting in it first, and so nothing was happening. Shopping out here in the boonies had not produced good results.

 

So we asked to see our friends’ sofa. It’s not what we’d choose if we were out in the world, but it seemed like it would work really well, and it was a lot lighter and firmer than what we had. They were getting a new living room setup but had room in their garage to keep the old sofa until we figured out how to get rid of ours and how to get theirs moved to our house.

 

During a pandemic.

 

First, I checked with friends, one at a time. This took a few weeks, as people considered and one by one said no. My (former) housekeeper had a lead, who called me, but she hadn’t given him enough important information (it’s a sleeper! you have to move it yourself!), and he wasn’t interested after all.

 

Because of the pandemic, I had wanted to avoid online marketplace stuff, not really into the idea of letting strangers into my house. But time was passing, and I was feeling guilty about the time passing. So I posted our couch. Free, but it needed to be picked up. We couldn’t help.

 

I got a bite pretty quickly, but it was from someone who needed a lot of hand holding, asking where I lived and asking, when I told her, Where is that? I wasn’t sure that someone unable to find my town on her computer was my best bet. When I told her how far I was from another town, she dropped out of the running, living as far away as she did, but why she was on my local marketplace at all is a mystery.

 

More days went by. I was getting discouraged. I didn’t want to take my beloved, but worn, couch to the dump, where I would have to pay cash money for its immediate demise (by law they couldn’t let someone else have it, apparently).

 

Then, on Memorial Day, I get a message: Is this still available? Yes. I could come get it today. Really? Where are you? He was 10 minutes away, the next town over.

 

Within the half hour, a strapping young (to me) man and his two equally strapping friends were pulling their pickup truck into my driveway. They lifted that sofa like it was nothing, and it just fit the bed of the truck.

 

And just like that, it was gone.

 

My across-the-street friend Thom has a small box truck?/cube van? and was willing to help us. So at last, we called our friends, and we picked up the couch. More than five weeks after they offered it to us.

 

We have nice friends.