Sofas I Have Found and Loved from Down the Street

Daily writing prompt

What’s the best thing you’ve ever found randomly on the street?

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I could claim to have found a lucky charm or a hundred-dollar bill, but what I really found, careening around my neighborhood late for some meeting or some kid, were two sofas. A rose-colored mid-century beauty that seemed to have been barely touched and a serviceable, tending toward the raggedy, kind of lumpy thing that drastically needed a cover-up.

I zoomed home to get my boys to help me load them one by one into the back of our SUV. It was just a few blocks from the ‘curb store’ to our house but treacherous, the physics of the carry (more weight out than in the automobile) making the odds of a dump in the middle of the street not in our favor.

People are embarrassed by curb shopping, especially in their own neighborhood. I get it. My neighbor ventures out in the dark when I put something yummy at the curb. It’s like “I don’t want to know you that well.”

I’m not above tiptoeing down the street in the dark if there was something especially lovely. During the pandemic, I scored the cutest wooden table and two chairs, but the chairs quickly became undependable, sitting-wise so we, of course, put them at the curb for someone else to pick up.

Once my husband and a neighbor came upon a pair of bedroom dressers at the curb. “You should take them. You have a lot of kids,” my husband said to the neighbor. “No, you should take them, the drawers don’t shut right.” I’ll let you guess.

I’ve been infatuated with the whole ‘making do’ approach to life forever. So picking up furniture off the curb makes sense to me – not all the time, you know, we have actually purchased decent furniture in actual furniture stores but sometime when there is a particularly unique sofa or table or lamp or whatnot that someone has fallen out of love with, something that has been orphaned, well, that’s a magnet for me.

You asked.