Thursday, January 16, 2014

The Sofa Table





Today you and I and Grandma Gail traveled bravely to Lakeville to the Hom superstore to look for a sofa table.  I feel like a sofa table is the kind of piece of furniture that you aren't even aware exists until you turn 35.  But now that I am indeed 35, I go shopping for sofa tables.

Heavy white sky and snow wisping across the road.  Everything else a brittle brown stalk or a downtrodden building.  Everything glum.  Unwashed hair.  Sweet potato smeared on the collar of my fleece.  You in blue stripes and Dot's knit booties.  Gail in her white poof hat and Ugg-ish boots.  And seemingly no one else in the Hom superstore.

You found the Hom superstore fascinating.  So many colors and textures.  Furniture everywhere like hulking leather beasts.  Lamps with dangling faux crystals, rosemary-eucalyptus candles, throw pillows with birds or swirls or silky white hair.  And when you grew bored of the newness you simply bent your head forward and focused on sucking the front of the Baby Bjorn.

I found the Hom superstore exhausting.  I think because when you walk into someone's home there's always a moment of adjustment; you take in the color of the rug and the placement of the furniture and the texture of the blanket thrown over the back of the couch.  Spaces have a sense of presence and though I realize we're never consciously thinking about what this or that knick-knack MEANS I do think that we're absorbing the aesthetic somehow.  So I find walking through 50 different staged living rooms in the span of 15 minutes to be rather overwhelming.

I did however love the expression on the showroom employee's face when she leaned over the couch on which Grandma Gail and I were sitting and came face to face with my naked boob.  She immediately backed away as though she'd found a scorpion singing Raffi songs but then you could see (SEE!) her think "I should act like this is no big deal, right?  Right.  No big deal" and then she came back toward us and mumbled something about "were we finding everything" at which point you stopped nursing so you could watch her and she got a full glimpse of my nipple hanging out of the side of your mouth. 

We did not buy a sofa table.  And when we got home and I showed Daddy the pictures we'd taken of possible candidates, he sweetly but condescendingly told me that those were really console tables, not sofa tables at all.  I guess that makes me 34.


No comments:

Post a Comment