The Christmas Couch
My neighbor, a decorator, was moving down the street and looking to get rid of her living room sofa. Every few years, she said, she sold her furniture and started over. I couldn’t imagine that as in my family we spend years collecting things and savoring their stories, and we rarely part with our treasures.
Back in the early 90s, when my neighbor was ridding herself of her sofa, the off-white brocade camelback with rolled arms suggested a soft elegance I was looking for to furnish my mostly empty living room.
We had family room furniture — my grandmother’s sofa, two hand-me-down club chairs, and a wing chair we’d bought right after our wedding. But the wing chair sat alone as we waited for a windfall to furnish the formal living room of our new house. So when my neighbor offered to sell me her sofa at a very reasonable price, I sent my husband and a friend across the street to fetch it.
In her house, the sofa sat in a red room as I recall, under the lowest of lights. When my husband set it up in my own living room, painted Builder’s Beige at the time, I was shocked to find that nice brocade was covered in black and white cat hair I had not noticed.
So I set to work on the sofa, vacuuming and cleaning it so the white of the fabric showed through again, making it clean enough to sit on. Eventually the white grew dull enough to need replacing, so I chose formal silk in keeping with the rest of the room.
I came to think of it as my Christmas Couch, since the only time we really used it was when we gathered around the tree to open presents. I have pictures of Santa’s loot— guitars and boom boxes, baseball gloves, and tea sets — placed carefully on its cushions. You can set a timeline by who’s sitting on it: my mother-in-law with her grandchildren a year or two before she died. And more recently, my son next to his then bride-to-be.
As we’ve been redecorating trying to relax the living room a bit, it felt like time to get rid of the camelback, so I decided to donate it. I sent a picture of it to The Green Chair Project, hoping a family starting over might find some use for my Christmas Couch. (Green Chair takes donations of furniture and home goods and in Charlotte, Furnish for Good will take your donations.)
That was in early July and I quite forgot about my Christmas Couch.
Months later, I was writing a story for our church about Family Promise, an emergency shelter program that houses the families temporarily, housing the in churches all over the Raleigh area. For two weeks at a time, families are guests of churches — 50 in all — eating dinner prepared by volunteers and sleeping in Sunday School rooms that go unused for much of the summer.
One story, in particular, emerged, about a single mother, Elizabeth, and her 21-year-old son with Down Syndrome. They’d been living on the street for about a month before coming to Family Promise. The son was struggling with their situation, and our volunteers were asked to avoid personal contact with him, lest he acts out at anyone, especially the other families we were hosting.
But as the days passed, his behavior softened and he was interacting with the other families who were our guests as well as volunteers.
I sat with the mother one evening and she told me her story, of riding the bus every day from Wal-Mart to Wal-Mart, all over Raleigh, to give her son something to do. During the day, they’d walk the aisles, and at night, they found cover behind the stores, rising early each morning to catch the bus. It was clear they needed a home.
Within days, our church and volunteers found a house for the family, and a team of good people took the mother to find furniture to fill it. One of my friends is a member of the team supporting this family as they rebuild their lives, and she had taken them to The Green Chair Project.
That same night, my friend came to our house for a gathering in our newly redecorated living room. She told me about taking Elizabeth and her son with Down Syndrome to select items for their new home at Green Chair. As my friend flipped through the pictures on her phone showing me what the mother had chosen, one of them stopped me. There was my Christmas Couch, complete with new pillows, in the middle of the living room this family now calls home.
The tears came quickly, so moved I was to know the family who now owns it.
The next Monday, I visited their new home and saw my Christmas Couch. It seems settled, in a way that it never did in my own living room, and I’m humbled by the new life this family will give it.
- Susan
Note: This essay first appeared on Susan’s blog in 2018 but she recently reconnected with Elizabeth and brought to mind once again this great story.
Susan Byrum Rountree is the director of communications for St. Michael’s Episcopal Church. She is the author of Nags Headers and In Mother Words. Her own blog is https://www.susanbyrumrountree.com where she has recently been chronicling her journey with breast cancer and chemotherapy.