Day 3 = Row, Row, Row, your Couch Gently Down the Stream...

Once upon a time, there was a lovely young couple who had the crazy idea that leaving the hustle and bustle of city life behind in order to strike out on their own in the middle of nowhere sounded like a fun adventure. Not all of their children shared this same enthusiasm especially since by the early 1980s, my family and I had been living squashed together in an extremely teeny tiny home for about ten years. The place would have made a loft in Manhattan feel like the Palace of Versailles. There are little girls who own dollhouses with bigger bedrooms than the one my sister and I were forced to share and everyone was starting to become jealous of the roomy living arrangements enjoyed by the average sardine. There was only one elf-sized bathroom for our family of five and when my grandparents came for their weekly visit, my parents gave up their own bedroom in exchange for sleeping bags on our living room floor.

I am about six years younger than my parents were during this period of time. My husband and I have recently returned from a weekend in the Adirondacks where we camped on an island that was only accessible by boat. Space constraints in our kayak severely limited the amount of gear which we were able to reasonably transport to our campsite. Foolishly, among the luxury items that ended up on the chopping block were our foam sleeping mats. We have been back for almost a week and our poor bodies have still not completely recovered. I am still awkwardly holding my neck to one side as though I have just heard a strange noise off in the distance. My husband's spine is now permanently kinked into the shape of a lightning bolt and he is stuck in the little tea pot position at "tip me over and pour me out." I simply cannot imagine sleeping on the floor once a week. Obviously, they loved my grandparents a lot. I'm not sure if I love anyone that much!

Things continued that way until one day, when my normally patient, kind and loving mother simply snapped. Who could blame her? I mean how many mornings can you wake up after the dog steps on your face only to realize that somehow during the night you ended up with carpet burn from the middle of your chin to the top of your left ear, feeling like it is probably a good idea to put the chiropractor on speed dial. What's a lady to do? Did she give my dad's parents the boot? Nope, she went and grabbed a circular saw to do what needed to be done.

In order to comprehend the events that followed, you must be aware that my grandfather was a collector of sorts, not the type of guy that you might see on an episode of Hoarders or anything, but like most of his generation, living through the Great Depression deeply impacted his world view. He simply could not bear to throw perfectly good items into the trash. He was a part of the reduce, reuse, recycle scene before it even existed as an official movement. He was the very first person I ever knew who recycled aluminum. In the cupboards of his home, you could find the following items carefully stored in zip-lock baggies waiting patiently to be re-purposed at some future date: old rubber bands, washed out drinking straws, crinkled twist ties, cleaned plastic bread bags, and varying lengths of string. His philosophy was not strictly limited to small household items. My grandparents maintained two residences and our place was located halfway between them. While our house was itty bitty, our property was not so sometimes the larger stuff ended up landing and languishing at our house for a considerable period of time until my grandpa came up with a new use for each item whether it be lumber, hunks of metal, heavy equipment, or kilos of packing peanuts.

That fateful morning, my mom had her eye on a large stack of plywood that had been lying around the backyard for awhile and she set off to work at a frenzied pace in order to resolve their sleeping issues while simultaneously gaining some much needed extra storage. After the kids were at school and my dad left for work, she spent the day designing, building, and upholstering an amazing sectional sofa which solved three issues. 1) It used up most of the nuisance lumber. 2) It contained numerous hidden storage solutions including six roomy storage compartments under the seat cushions, cubby holes inside all of the back rests with loads of book shelving along the bottom. Her innovative creation made the best designer/organizer on HGTV look like a piker. 3) And most importantly, it rested on castors and the three pieces could be easily wheeled together to make a full size bed so that my parents didn't have to wake up face down on the floor every Friday morning.

Anytime that my mom took on this kind of project, her goal was to finish it before everyone else returned home for the day. By the time we stepped off the school bus that afternoon, there would be a beautiful new couch waiting for us in our living room. It lasted for many years, and it would become a cozy little home for crafting supplies, toys, photo albums and books. When my dad built us a much larger new house on the same plot of land, with two bathrooms, a proper guestroom and enough square footage to host our entire extended family if need be, it would be rolled across the lawn and into the family room of our brand new basement. Despite its longevity and quality construction, depending on your point of view, it may have contained one tiny design flaw, an inadvertent oversight by my mother that could have happened to anyone really. It turns out that the random pile of seemingly unloved lumber that my grandfather had temporarily abandoned at our house wasn't your average everyday pressboard. It was actually extremely expensive grade A marine plywood.

I'm not sure exactly what he was eventually planning to do with it, but I guarantee that he did not intend to have it made into a cute little sofa that swallowed up loads of clutter, provided comfortable sleeping space for two, and could also be rowed to safety in an emergency should our family find ourselves stranded by rising flood waters. It didn't help that it would have to be some kind of unprecedented 100 year deluge since our house rested on one of the the highest points between Pittsburgh and Erie. If rainstorms that hadn't been seen since the time of Noah should arise, we would be ready to start loading up the ole davenport with animals two by two. For a while my grandfather could only see it as a really expensive place to park your derriere, but the rest of us preferred to think of it as one more way to increase the versatility of a piece of furniture lovingly handcrafted by my mom. Eventually, even Grandpa was able to come around to our way of thinking.

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