It's so lazy being green
Pride in ownership can last a long, long time and leave a smaller carbon footprint.
IT'S HIGH SUMMER, so my three teenage daughters and I have heaved the yard couch off the big porch of our 1910 Craftsman bungalow here in Riverside and onto the front lawn under the Raywood ash tree, where this couch -- now 10 years old -- will remain in state until the first rains in November.
The yard couch is dark blue with multicolored flowers that have no known match in nature.
I bought it when my girls were small, and dark colors seemed like a good idea in case of stains. They loved that soft couch with a passion, and countless children and teens have slept on it, sat on it, hung out on it. So when I bought a new white couch two Junes ago, my girls and their friends protested vehemently. When they said, "Can we just keep the old one outside for a week -- it's summer!" I gave in, and I'm still giving in.
It's so embarrassing. After all, the ads for upscale outdoor furniture are relentless. These days, it's not enough to have plastic-strap gliders and metal chaise lounges with puffy oilcloth cushions, though that's what I grew up with. (No feeling like peeling your sweaty legs from oilcloth.) Now it's elaborate curtained gazebos, wicker and teak coffee tables and rattan rugs. We are meant to create elegant "outdoor living spaces."
We have a nice living room inside, with the new couch. But outside, we have a weathered redwood love seat and chairs sold to me by a Gypsy family. We have the redwood picnic table and benches my mother handed down to me 20 years ago. She bought them in 1958, for her first patio when she was a young married woman in Fontana. (My mother hates the fact that the couch is outside for the third year, and all that it portends.) But we don't have an outdoor room. We have a frontyard.
We throw about six parties every summer in the frontyard. Three birthdays, Fourth of July and various no-reason-at-all celebrations that feature foosball and pingpong. Food on the picnic table. Sodas in an old green-plastic turtle sandbox filled with ice. A boombox on the porch. (The stereo system? Set up on the porch? So much trouble.) Under the tree, the couch with five or six kids crowded on.
The week before my eldest turned 19, the week before we celebrated her birthday with a frontyard party, she went to a backyard party where the newly elaborate decor and landscaping included a copper fire pit that blazed on top of a fountain (which I find hard to visualize) surrounded by formal furniture and rugs, a manicured putting green, a volleyball court and a new saltwater pool.
