The Old Brown Couch

I have fought nobly against the passage of time for much of my life.  I suppose some people may call this a resistance to change.

When I was five, life was good.  It was predictable and consistent.  I would wake up every morning to the same cartoons.  Dad would make me the same kinds of Toaster Strudels, and I would go to the baby sitter’s house via the same route.  For five blissful years it seemed my life was perfect, and I would be a kid forever.  And then one day, it happened.  Change.  My first realization that time is long and the lives of others are no measure against its vastness.  I wish I could say that this life lesson was first learned via my relationship with another sentient being.  However, I am sad to say that no.  Alas, I learned this lesson via my relationship with an old brown couch.  Yes.  It was time.  My parents were sick of that old brown couch that sat happily and tired in our living room.  It reeked of ancient dust and old farts.  It had been well lived on.  But it was surely time for it to go.  Go where?  Of course, at the time I did not know.  Maybe to the farm, where I had heard all old lives go.  Or maybe, as I learned later, the place where all old furniture goes.  To some lucky bachelor’s apartment, who would be thrilled for the $5 dollar deal at the local GoodWill.  Wherever that brown couch was to go, I was not happy about it.  I will not forget that Saturday morning, possibly for as long as I will live.   Mom and Dad dusted and wiped down the couch an opened up the front door to carry it out.  I insisted on saying my goodbyes, and I wept like a champ.  “Change is terrible!” I thought to myself.  Mom and Dad pursued to escort the old brown couch out of the living room, and I had what I can today recollect as my first true breakdown.  I spiraled willfully out of control.  “I never want to grow up!” I exclaimed.  I cried and cried and cried.  I was inconsolable and my parents were completely at a loss.  Oh no, they must of thought, how is she going to react when we have to get rid of the dryer?  That old recliner has to go too.  How is she going to react to that?  I think at that moment I may have encouraged a mild pack rat habit in both of my parents.  For example that old recliner…. It didn’t go until high school.  Sorry mom and dad.

After the brown couch incident, I got a little better with change – but only slightly.  I fought change as best as I could, but to no avail.  Life carried on, as did time.  Big life changes did not become any easier because I was convinced I wanted to be a kid, and a young person forever.  Who doesn’t?  I suppose you can say I was not in a hurry to grow up.  Later in life this manifested into me not being in a hurry to get married, buy a house, be done with school (Side note: I’m still not done with school). 

However, then I turned 30, and my thoughts about time and its passage quickly evolved.  See somewhere in your young adulthood you notice that your parents start to grow older.  You notice that your friends move away and start new lives of their own.  You have to say goodbye to lots of people, and the gravity of the goodbyes weighs you down.  You begin to convince yourself you are saying more goodbyes than helloes.  It is in these moments that I find great sadness.  It is in these moments I seek solace, and I yearn for a peace that lifts the weight on my heart.  And as with all times in my life when I search for these things… I look to nature for her guidance, as some people look to God.  I suppose I consider the two synonymous.

In this year of 30, I have been letting nature teach me more about time.  I have succumbed to the reality that I can no longer fight time, its power, or its omnipresence.  In this year, I have taken more note of Nature’s rhythms and her tides.  I suppose this is also aided by my PhD research.  I spend long hours out among the trees, catching bugs, and trying to better understand their place in a world that we have greatly altered.  I have to think of all the variables that may affect the growth, survival, and behavior of my one small beast of interest.  And in doing this thought experiment, I have learned a great deal about Nature’s elegant handling of time.  Trees, for example, the very trees I have known all my life, are most predictable.  They flower in the early spring and fruit in late summer and fall.  Very few trees in the Southeast Piedmont I have discovered flower during the summer.  “But why?” I recently asked.  I would like to think that trees follow this cadence because they have evolved to share time with their short-lived plant brethren, the forbs and grasses.  Summer is the season for asters, roses, and grasses.  Trees flower and carry out reproduction before some of the first wildflowers even break the surface of the soil.  Many trees rely on the same pollinators for reproduction that forbs do.  And thus it may seem that Nature and her plants have created a timeline that optimizes the use of one of her greatest resources for reproduction, the bees and the small flying things.  Over millennia, plants and insects have together established a rhythm that is most elegant and refined and I am entirely in awe.  

However, what I have also discovered in this year of 30 is that Nature does not resist change.  Although she has established a beautiful rhythm, her rhythm constantly changes with every season and day.  Nature is change.  And I have learned that when I feel most feverish and foolish in the face of change, I can look to Nature to learn how better to handle it with grace, wisdom, and patience.  There is a rhythm in my life too.  Accepting change and time’s prowess will help me discover the melody that governs both my life and the lives of others.

I suppose in this year of 30, my brown couch syndrome is not entirely cured.  I am human after all.  I am a work in progress, as all humans are.  We are a chaotic, rather insecure bunch.  However, I have hope that I have turned a corner.  Maybe this means I will welcome a new life chapter with more grace, or maybe this means I will let go of the past more tenderly, like autumn leaves in the slightest breeze.  I hope, at the very least, it means I will let go of old broken furniture more readily.  Could I call this year my pack-rat cure?  My husband would be thrilled. 

And so brown couch I say adieu.  May you be refurnished in a broke bachelor’s home and bring joy in your new life.  I must move on.  The time for welcoming a new living room set is long overdue.  Adieu.  

Good night 54 N. Davis Drive.

I drove away looking in the rear view mirror only to see the back of a dog’s head through a window made of boxes.  I saw the colors of the house, dark peach with light orange-cicle trim, and I saw the leaves of the pecan tree I used to climb as a little girl… and then it was gone.  I suppose I was not expecting much when I drove away that day.  I knew the bustle of the move would rob me of sentimental time, but I at least thought I would have a better look in the rear view mirror.  I cursed.  “Damn, Sarah, you should have drove the other way.  You would have had a better view.”  And with my cursing I stopped at the stop sign at which I had stopped a thousand times and turned right off of old N. Davis Drive for the last time.  Childhood memories and identities left to fallow in the fields of my youth. 

Nostalgia is a funny thing.  It can waken and trap our souls given its dose.  Too much of anything is a bad thing.  And when left to ferment in nostalgia, one can get lost in a past that can never be reclaimed.  My parents wanted to move out of my childhood home 10 years ago when my sister and I left the house for college, but mom’s job kept them rooted.  For the past few years my parents have been living in a house of stale memories, the occasional new memories created during holiday visits.  It is for this reason, I cannot be too sad.  My parents are thrilled to start a new chapter in a new locale, yet admittedly I cannot help that my heart still hurts as I drive away.

A few years ago I wrote a piece about “falling in love with the land.”  I loved that small fragment of property on which my parents raised us.  I formed my identity in that place.  And as with all loves that come and go, they are always a part of who you are and who you have become.  I skinned my knees on that gravel drive when I first learned to ride a bike.  I learned how to climb trees on the pecan in the side yard.  I learned how to garden in that soil, and I found God in that field on our property.  The memories are too numerous to count, and so I thought for now I would recall just one. 

When I moved back to Georgia for a brief time from Tucson, I was more than eager to plant a garden.  Having been deprived of the green luscious vegetation of the Southeast for a year, I not only wanted to be outside in it, but I wanted to create more of it.  I was ambitious.  Dad and I plowed and planted an eighth of an acre.  Being novices we overseeded and didn’t thin.  The result was a jungle of tomatoes, cucumbers, and squash.  My folks fed the neighborhood that summer.  Dad took tomatoes to Ms. Woodward next door, whose husband many years before had delivered tomatoes to us.  Mom took lemon cucumbers to her hospital by the load, and the squash emerged like daylilies from the field.  However, I suppose it was not the produce that I remember so fondly, but it was sitting in the garden that warm summer morning soon after we had put the seeds in the ground.  As I sat in the garden, Dad’s Motown tunes, the same ones he used to play all those years working on the house, wafted over from his workshop.  The temperature that day was perfect, and the dogs in the yard were playing.  I was overwhelmed by a peace possibly we only know at the most special moments in our lives and maybe again in heaven.  Somehow the world was right, and I have never felt so rooted and loved.  I stayed in that moment for a long while before I moved from my spot in the field, and I will never forget that moment for the remainder of my life.  I don’t doubt heaven will resemble its image in my mind.  It was a rare moment in which heaven met earth.

And so with that I say “Good night 54 N. Davis Drive. Good night sweet dancing pines.  Goodnight Buster, Aussie, Georgia, Baron, Sabbath, Puzzle, and Oz – the Parsons’ dog legacies forever planted in that earth.  Good night skinned knees and dreams of my youth.  Good night home.”  Until we meet again…