A COUCH BY ANY OTHER NAME WOULD NOT FEEL AS SWEET

Most people have a couch. Wouldn't you agree? We call them sofas, chesterfields, settees (well, no one I know calls them that but ..), davenports, all nature of words. But I like couch.

A couch should be an invitation, someone sitting on it patting her hand to welcome you into her world. A couch should say,"Come on in, sit a minute with me." The nap and weave of a couch's surface should make you want to put your face against it like you did with your baby blankets on your upper lip when you were little, the baby blanket that you were traumatized about when it went to the place where all worn out baby blankets go to die. (Twelve years of therapy and I still can't talk about it). When you sit on the couch it should envelop you with warmth and comfort and make you exhale in a cleansing fashion, an "ahh, I'm home" kind of breathing out.

I have a friend who has a leather couch. In fact, I won't call it a couch. It isn't worthy. I shall call it a settee; even the word makes me grimace. She used to have a lovely cream-coloured couch that I could jump on and pull one of her several aphghans over me and tuck my feet against hers. We would share stories, real stories about us, our wounds, our confessions. We'd turn our heads occasionally and stare at the television, but mostly we just snuggled in, glad to be together, cosy and safe and warm.

Somewhere along the line this friend decided she needed something new in her livingroom. She gave into the dark side of decorating fashion and bough a leather squarish thing (I can hear the cows crying out in anguish) in a colourless beige. This piece of furniture looks like a cast-off from the Jetsons. Even Leroy didn't find it acceptable. It is like sitting on a park bench only less friendly.

I jump on it, but its surface doesn't give. I'm willing to bet this hideous excuse for a sitting apparatus would survive re-entry into the atmosphere without benefit of a heat shield. This one piece of leatherwork has forced me to reconsider my friendship. For thirty-one years we've snuggled under yellow aphgans, green ones, beige ones, ones of every colour, our toes and legs entwined, she at one end, me at the other, pausing only to listen to her husband when he entered our sacred space.

I can't compromise my standards. Sometimes you just have to take a stand.

The leather sofa goes or ... I do.

(I hope I don't have to put my money where my mouth is.)

written by W A Stewart January 30, 2010