Goodbye, white couch

I'm fascinated by the almost natural tendency of humans to save.  Not save lives or save money per say, but to save "stuff."  We will save items out of supposed necessity (i.e. "I might need this someday...."), or out of sheer likeness (i.e. "I like the color of that shirt so I'll hang onto it a bit longer,") but probably the biggest reason we insist on keeping ourselves surrounded by things of sometimes sheer randomness is because of sentimentality. 

I'm big on sentiment.  I have kept notes from my high school friends for years and years, I have tee-shirts collected from family vacations when I was in elementary school, and it's almost impossible for me to throw away birthday cards no matter who they're from.  All of these items are special to me, and are tied to important people and events in my life.....or so I tell myself.  But when you get right down to it, how many tee-shirts does a person really need in their life?  Are our memories really fused and encompassed in a folded up piece of notebook paper a friend passed to us in Biology class sophomore year, or are those memories instead housed in the individual?

I bring this up because I am at a crossroads with my husband about a room in our house.  We have a den downstairs that right now is being used as just that....a den, with a couple couches, a coffee table, and some lamps.  Dean has big plans for this room, and those plans involve a pool table.  I fought him tooth and nail in the beginning about this, but have slowly started to come around and agree that, yes, we might actually use this room more with a pool table, it would be great for entertaining when friends are over, blah, blah, blah.  Here's where things get tricky.  In order to get the pool table, the furniture must go or at least be rearranged.  One of the pieces of furniture in this room is a white couch, with a subtle floral pattern.  A hand-me-down couch, but still in great condition and fairly easy on the eyes.  This couch belonged to my Nana and Papa, who passed away quite a few years ago.  Dean and I rescued the couch from the storage facility in Prosser a few years ago, and it has been with us ever since. 

My memories of Nana and Papa are in no way directly tied to this piece of furniture.  We didn't share any particularly memorable moments on this couch, in fact we rarely ever sat on it when I went to their house to visit.  But it was still their couch, and when we went to the storage shed to retrieve it almost four years ago I was so excited to see it again....it was akin to reclaiming a small piece of my childhood, and at the time, I thought, to helping me remember Nana and Papa.  It felt nice to have a piece of them back. 

Initially, when faced with the prospect that the couch would have to go in order to have the pool room, I dug in my heels and said no way no how.  But the more I thought about it, the more I realized that giving away the white couch was in no way synonymous to giving away my memories of my grandparents.  The couch in my den is not the keeper of my memories and my feelings.  While it may have at first acted as a trigger of those memories, I don't NEED that couch in order to remember Nana and Papa.  

It literally took me months to come to this conclusion.  I'm telling you, the sentimentality barrier is a tough one to break, but once you do it can be very clarifying.  I was finally able to see the couch for what it was: a piece of furniture.  I'll probably pass the white couch down to my sister, Dean and I will get a pool table, and life will continue to move forward as it has a way of doing.  Remembering my grandparents won't be any harder to do once the couch is gone, and I'm sure one of these days when I'm flipping through the photo album I might event see a picture of that white couch at its original home in a single-level, three bedroom house on Benson Avenue in Prosser.  I'll see that photo, which will probably be of a couple young girls playing in the living room at Nana and Papa's house.  I'll examine the picture and I'm sure I will smile.  But I don't think it will be because of the couch.