The Eye of the Beholder

Home is the place where, when you go there, they have to take you in.

Robert Frost

We used to have what I nowadays call the “missionary couch”.  My husband and I bought the couch when we were young marrieds. We’d moved to Bozeman, Montana, after he graduated from BYU, so he could manage a Kentucky Fried Chicken franchise for my uncle. We owned no furniture at all except the brand new baby crib his mother had given to us at the birth of her first grandchild. Fortunately, my husband discovered a former missionary companion in Bozeman who worked at the local furniture store. “I’ll send over a couch and an easy chair,” he told my husband. “If you like them, you can buy them. If not, I’ll pick them up in a couple of days.” We were desperate. A couple of days or several years sounded great.

It was a nice couch—8 feet long and sturdy, which was important as one child after another was born and learned to climb on it. Ten years in, it was looking tattered and abused, but we couldn’t afford a new one, so I enrolled in a community upholstery night class at Granger High. They provided the tools and the teacher; we class members provided projects in desperate need of upgrade.

My husband decided to do a little reinforcing of the skeleton before I covered it and the matching chair from the frame up with new stuffing and fabric. Time had already proven that my husband did not know the meaning of the word “moderation”. (When he added a room over the garage to our house, he anchored it with a twelve-foot steel beam. A mild earthquake some years later shook the whole neighborhood, but not even a chair budged in that extra room.) With considerable glee, he pulled out his fiberglass kit, plastering every joint with a couple of layers of nylon mesh and 1/2 dozen layers of epoxy. By then, the couch was so strong that the house could have collapsed on top of it, and whoever was taking a nap on the sofa wouldn’t have even noticed.

Good thing because I had five boys in a row. They used it as a net to play balloon volleyball, a mat for wrestling matches, a dining room table so they wouldn’t miss an episode of Star Trek, and a bed for whichever one or two were on the high school basketball team and were so tired after practice, they couldn’t make it downstairs to their own beds. Son #4 actually grew six inches sleeping on that couch one year. We measured!

One winter, five of my own children and two for whom I did daycare all came down with the mumps. For two weeks, the old couch rose to the occasion, embracing as many as three or four sets of pillows and blankets with miserable little people trying to find a few moments of rest. Years later, one long and lonely night, I sat all night on the floor next to the old couch, holding the hand of a beloved child as she wept and tossed and writhed in pain from the early stages of a lifelong, debilitating disease.

Another ten years passed. The couch was doing its best, but there was no question that it was close to collapse. Instead of giving it a well-earned retirement, we chose to use the money to send Daughter #1 and Son #1 on missions. They were barely home when Son # 3 headed out. By the time he got back, Son # ‘s 4 and 5 were leaving. The couch became frayed, the stuffing oozing out in the worn places. The fabric faded with the sun while the maid (me) scrubbed fruitlessly at the growing stains, hoping to make it last just another year or two.

When Son #6 left for his mission in Mexico, we gave up and had it reupholstered a second time. Then a neighbor’s daughter moved in with us for a couple of weeks while her family was in upheaval. She stayed 10 years. We sent her on a mission to Arkansas instead of finally buying a new couch.

Now, some of my adult children were starting new families of their own. One parent or another would lay a baby in a corner of the couch for a nap, or cuddle a two-year-old who had scraped her knee until she stopped crying. Nothing fazed the old couch. We thought about celebrating its 30th birthday, but my husband and I were called on an Inner City Mission; we were too busy to bake a cake. Eventually, the couch came full circle—a newly-married couple hauled it to their university apartment, where it provided comfort for many a late-night study session.

All total, the couch persevered through eight children, nine missionaries, and thirty-five years. I often wondered if it ever felt inadequate when compared to the high-fashion ones I saw in Better Homes and Gardens Magazine. But like many a hard-working person I know, the beauty of the old couch had always shone through the service, not the view