Last night we finally got around to putting the old, character laden (and spring free) couch out on the sidewalk ready for the lovely, heavily unionized Montreal garbage collection folks to deal with. As we live in the middle of a tourist zone, this all has to be done in a ‘tasteful’ manner and without blocking any walkways – pretty tricky after 15cm of snow with sidewalks that are pretty thin to start with. Still, after much heavy lifting, and some furtive glances (what is it about putting old furniture and junk out on the street that seems so wrong, even when you’ve phoned the council to ask?) the couch sat around the corner from us – loaded with old bits of wood and the like that were too trashed to be reused in any meaningful way.
So at 2am this morning the dulcet tones of a trash cart reversing woke us up (again) and we imagined that our dear old friend was safely on his way to a new home. Turns out we were wrong – this morning at 9am he was still there, same place, with nothing moved. I guess he must have been really trashed for noone to come pick it up! But then after wandering to the bread shop, picking up some more blank DVDs for backups and a few other bits and bobs – the couch was gone. Nothing other than a couch shaped indentation in the snow to mark his passing.
Farewell old friend. We’ll miss losing entire body parts into your failing springs, and worrying about more deep gouges in the new flooring from where your wires break loose. We’ll miss the clouds of dust you gave off when we sat down, and your particular odour of many years of smoking, sitting and possibly other things that shouldn’t be mentioned on a family blog (not by me I hasten to add – I value certain body parts too much to lose them in a freak sofa accident). Every time we sit on our new, cheap but comfortable, bland IKEA sofa we’ll miss your almost trendy stripes and faded glory. Only for a moment mind, there’s probably something good on the telly that we can now watch without fear of being swallowed alive. Lovely.