Why I'm Grateful for My Old, Faded Sofas

When you walk in my living room, you can’t help but notice my hand-me-down sofas.  I’m no interior designer, but even I can tell they’re dated.  Having once belonged to my grandma, who loved bright colors and patterns, the sofas are floral-print and now faded.  Some might even call them ugly.  But I’m grateful for them.



While my widowed grandma was dying of breast cancer almost two years ago, it occurred to me that once she was gone, so were all the stories about the familiar pieces of beautiful old furniture in her home—the home she and Grandpa had lived in for almost half a century.  So I started asking her questions:  Where did that painting come from?  Tell me about the dogwood Tiffany lamp.  Does that old firewood bucket have a story?

So Grandma told me story after story about the antiques that I had seen so often around her house but never stopped to wonder about.  She told me about the maple bedroom suite her father chose for her sixteenth birthday present, and that he had much better taste than she did—she would have picked “something faddish, like bleached walnut.”  She told me about the deacon’s bench Grandpa built, which he entered in the Farm Show and won first place.  She told me about the gorgeous lamp my great-grandfather used to study by in elementary and high school.  She told me about her father’s desk, where he sat to count nickels as his church’s treasurer.  She told me about her grandmother’s 100-year-old china, which was delivered in a huge wash basket.  She told me about the people who had owned and built and loved these things that had been passed down through generations.



As she told these stories, people I had only seen in faded photographs became real, and people I had only known in their older years became young and vibrant again.  I could feel the spirit of Elijah working in my heart:  “And he shall turn the heart of the fathers to the children, and the heart of the children to their fathers.”  (Malachi 4:6)  My love for my grandma grew in ways it never had before, and I began to feel love for people I had never even met, but who had still shaped the person I am and can become.



Grandma didn’t really have any stories to tell me about her faded old sofas; she just picked them out a decade or two ago, and they sat in her living room.  So why am I grateful for them?  I’m grateful because I have stories about them.  I remember sprawling out on the floor next to them to build wooden spool towers with Grandpa.  I remember sitting on them to open the Easter eggs we had found in her front yard, to find that they each contained a quarter—just like every year.  I remember sitting there to look through old photo albums or watch the Macy’s Thanksgiving parade on TV.  I’m grateful for my floral-print sofas because I remember sitting there, taking notes while Grandma told me her stories.

Published by Shellie