I’m changing my address from the nice suburban street where I now live to “Van, Down by the River”.  By rights, that’s what it should be, because although we have steadily been updating our older home, and have added some lovely features, at heart we remain urban hillbillies. 

Our front yard is tastefully landscaped.  We live very near the local elementary school, and many parents who pass our house going to and from the school have commented on our garden.  Oh, if they could only see what lies beyond.  The backyard is a combination of wasteland and landfill.  The automatic lawn sprinklers died years ago, replaced by an ineffective hose sprinkler that is powered by a manual timer called “Whenever I Remember”.  Thus it’s green under the mulberry tree in the corner, brown around the edges, and yellow in the middle, except for the patches of healthy local grasses (i.e., weeds) that pop up here and there.  Beyond the grass is dirt, highlighted by a dilapidated play structure that we have officially condemned, a rather nice raised vegetable box where my husband practices his unfulfilled farming urges, rotten tree stumps, and a contrasting well-groomed line of roses up against the house.  

On the side near the gate is the “basketball court”.  It is a slab of cement with a nice backboard at one end, but it also houses the garbage cans, a barbecue, and a toilet.  Makes for a pretty interesting game of hoops.  The toilet was removed in an effort to find a more powerful model that could accommodate both my husband’s voluminous output and our home’s crappy (pun intended) plumbing..  To replace it we found the mother of all toilets, which has only succumbed once to the plumbing, but unfortunately the cast-off has no place to go.  It’s not a bad toilet, either, and only a couple of years old.  Where do unemployed toilets go to look for work?  

But the pièce de résistance is the patio.  Ah yes, the patio.  The terrace.  The veranda.  The cracked aggregate concrete housing weeds, insects, a lopsided cheerful yellow patio set, stray toys, more roses, and the couch.  Yes, I said “couch”.  Doesn’t every nice home have a sofa on the veranda?  We did have a leather armchair as well, but that went to a new owner for $30 in a garage sale.  

The couch is a casualty of redecorating.  Five years ago it was deep blue, plush, ultra comfy, and seemingly well built.  Today it is threadbare and stained, with broken springs popping up between the cushions, all complements of the Kea children.  I dragged it out the sliding glass door to the patio the day the new furniture arrived.  Although I regularly shifted it to sweep and mop underneath, as I heaved it toward the door, left behind was a trail of crumbs, wrappers, plastic arms disconnected from some long lost superhero, marbles, popsicle sticks, and numerous other sticky detritus.  Apparently the sofa had been gobbling this debris for years, only to regurgitate in its death throws.  To add insult to injury, since moving it to it’s “temporary” spot, we’ve had our first rain.  

So in keeping with the image, we have a dead, moldy, decomposing sofa on our patio.  Do you know how hard it is to get rid of a yucky sofa?  It’s too far gone to give to the poor.  The local dump wants $125 to leave it there.  Which actually I’d be willing to pay if my husband and I could lift the damn thing down our steep driveway and into the truck, but we’ve already tried and failed.   So we are stuck with the only other option, which is to pay a hauling company $225 to take it away for us.   I guess we might as well add another $100 for the poor toilet.  

My husband, who was born and raised in the deep south, had another suggestion.  He’s very sensitive about redneck comments, feeling stuck up Californians look down upon his pan fried roots.  But seeing he’s sort of an “in your face” kind of guy, he is lobbying for moving the sofa and toilet to the front lawn, lighting a bonfire with one of the broken chairs from the garage, and sitting back to enjoy a Bud Lite.  He’d probably suggest having a shotgun at his knee, but I don’t allow firearms.  

He’s only joking (I think).  He doesn’t even like Bud Lite.  He likes expensive scotch.  Actually, I think he just likes to brag that he likes expensive scotch.  Anyway, the presence of a sofa outside our sliding glass doors seems to bother him less than the lawn needing to be mowed, or the condition of his lettuce crop.  I, on the other hand, am mortified.  After years of fearing guests because the inside of our home was so frightening, now I fear guests because they might see the outside.  No matter what I do, I cannot seem to keep up with the feculence of life.  “Feculence”…isn’t that a great word?  I found it in a thesaurus as a synonym for “excrement”.    

Perhaps we should keep the toilet, then, as a symbol of our struggles.  A literal symbol for my husband, more figurative for me.  Maybe my husband can plant a crop there.  And you can interpret that any way you like.