Dec 29, 2017 3 min read

Looking for a fresh start for the new year, I decided to remove the dog smell from the sofa in the den. It’s a big, overstuffed sectional that arrived from the delivery truck as a sage green but, under the weight and slobber of Howard, has turned blotchy and smelly and crispy in some spots.

Don’t we all like a fresh start? We live with something that’s dirty or broken or just not right, ignoring how it looks and smells for weeks and months, until that one day you decide you simply cannot live with it one more day.

I arrived at that place with the sofa this week. The better thing, in hindsight, might have been to hire a professional upholstery cleaner to handle the task, but I couldn’t wait. In a matter of moments, that sofa had gone from benignly dreary to an unacceptable, personal attack on my decorating esthetic.

And so I dove in, unzipping and peeling back the covers and extracting the huge marshmallow insides. That foam sprung forth like popped kernels, giving me fair warning of what I’d be up against when it was time to put this all back together.

I tossed the covers into the washer, added detergent, set it to cold and let the Maytag do its magic. Howard stood outside the room, confused by what had become of his sofa. The dirty green cushions had been replaced by huge white clouds. I heard him whimper as he walked away.

I hung the wet covers on the laundry room clothesline. Hanging them outside would have added a sunshine-fresh scent, but it was 17 degrees out there. The covers would have frozen into plywood.

I pulled the dried covers off the line and brought them upstairs to begin what I would soon learn was a task requiring geometry skills and physical dexterity I do not possess.

Because, while waiting overnight for their covers to dry, the cushion inserts went all bosomy, taking on air, blowing themselves up and tripling in size. It’s as if I’d baked the cushions in the oven. And now, I had to stuff these giant loaves of bread into their tidy fabric envelopes.

I’d expected to match rectangular cover with rectangular cushion and parallelogram cover with parallelogram cushion, but the laws of geometry no longer applied.

With no other choice, I began randomly stuffing these cushions into the covers, a task that required me to punch at the puff with one hand while holding the zipper opening together with the other. I’d have an easier time stuffing myself into the pants I wore in grade school and zipping them up. It was a three-person job, maybe four.

This took hours. I was exhausted and sweaty. The cushion inserts did not return to where they started.

It does not look like the same sofa. My squarish sectional has become potbellied and bloated. I’m not sure it’s even comfortable any more; the seatback cushions are so swollen you’d have to sit leaning forward at a 45-degree angle.

It does smell better – I will say that about it – but I wonder how long that will last. As I was putting it all back together, Howard was waiting just outside the door. He’s back at his old spot now, sleeping, unaware of the chaos he caused.

Beth Dolinar can be reached at cootiej@aol.com.