It all started with a faded rug
When it comes to getting a fresh perspective, rearranging the furniture ranks right up there with a new haircut or vacuuming out the car.
It’s not that I’m tired of the way my living room looks, but I had to do something about the area rug, and that’s what started my pushing and pulling. By the time it was over, I had a sore toe, a blister on my hand and some lingering memories from my childhood.
The Cape Cod house in Finleyville where I spent my first decade had two rooms at the front: one that was meant to be a dining room but was used as a piano room, and the living room. That was where all the indoor playing happened: the cartwheels and the dancing, the board games on the table. It was on the sofa where my parents would sit and watch the interminable little musicals and plays we staged. Years and years later, when a new owner invited me in for a look, I was shocked to see how small that room was that held all that activity; but then again, we were small, too.
Back when we lived there, we’d occasionally walk into the living room to find our mother dragging the sofa and side chairs from one side of the room to the other.
“Trying something new,” she would say as she enlisted us to pick up a corner of the area rug to help her rotate it. After that the sofa would be on the other wall, and the chair near the stairs. It wasn’t new furniture, of course, but a new way to live in that space. We kids felt that newness, too.
I thought of that as I moved my own furniture off my area rug this week. The sun coming through the wide patio doors (back when we actually had sunny days) had splashed the rug with faded spots. If I turned it around I could cover the spots with the coffee table.
I pushed the sofa away from and off the rug (and vacuumed under it for the first time, revealing a whole shameful world of crumbs and dust), then the ottoman and overstuffed reading chair. Now, the hard part, the coffee table. It’s solid wood, long and low with thick legs. I pushed until it got stuck and then lifted a corner, a clumsy maneuver that landed a leg on my toe and pinched the skin on my finger.
With a TV mounted on one wall and my Steinway along another and a fireplace in the corner, there are no real options for rearranging the room. But I could reposition the rug. The faded spots were now hidden under the table.
After looking at and living in that room for these three years, I now had a slightly new way to see it. For an extra touch I switched the butterfly throw pillows with the bee pillow. I rearranged the photos on the book shelf. It wasn’t much, but it was refreshing.
My living room is probably a bit larger than the one in my childhood. I thought about how my sisters and I would have used the space back when we were those three spindly little jumping beans. We could probably do bigger cartwheels and stage even more dramatic performances for our parents to endure.
And our mom? She would have stood there considering the room, how she might bring a new perspective to it. Maybe move the piano to the other wall and get rid of the TV? Maybe, but she’d start with that faded rug. Just as I did.