“You wouldn’t know it based on my dead-end status, but I live closer to a metropolitan area now, than I did. Just a scant 40 minutes from my home, I can look overhead & watch commercial airliners & F-16 fighter jets landing, or browse for fancy Italian glass tile in designer colors, or scavenge used lighting fixtures from a gigantic warehouse of recycled building materials. Let’s talk about that last one for a minute, because what it took to get my old couch to the ReStore drop-off portico, was epic. It was not a slam dunk that anyone would be able to drive my truck to the yurt, up a makeshift woods road, on a foot of unplowed snow, to retrieve it. One friend sided with me and said, flatly, “No”. The other said: “Give me the keys”. You know that feeling, when someone drives off with your vehicle, to do something sketchy. It’s that hopeless bond of trust that allows such things to happen. We waited, from a superior vantage point for observation, to catch sight of the Chevy blue. After a minute or so, it appeared, not surprisingly lurching, as we could see it through the trees, up and down like a bronco suddenly released from the rodeo pen. I cringed, thinking of my undercarriage, but also knowing, this is what a truck is for. If a film crew had caught the turn he made, it would have won advertising awards for 2021. Passing the barn, now on the home stretch, to the steepest incline, with a hidden layer of ice below, he hit the gas. Some things are patently inexplicable. Roaring in by the apple tree without hitting it, his equally emphatic reverse took a sideways slip, and was recovered, jumping up and over the drainage ditch, to achieve traction when it mattered most, around some sizable boulders. We didn’t lose time trudging up there and to be helpful, I shoveled the deck, while they wrestled the goods. Okay, the whole point of this story is that when I got to the recycling warehouse, and pulled in to unload, the ReStore volunteer, a pale but friendly enough fellow, came out to assist. I knew within a few seconds, it wasn’t going well. He was examining my upholstery a bit too closely. Somehow, I hadn’t anticipated this assessment of my beloved bed, of ten plus years. Yes, full disclosure, I’ve been sleeping on the couch for a long time, since my divorce. “I’m sorry, we don’t take furniture with pet hair”, he announced. I was stunned. Normally, I want to make other people feel better when they give me bad news. But this time, I was speechless. The computer in my brain did a sort of backflip. After all the effort, if not here, then where? I was not going to drive it back home. I thanked him, or maybe I didn’t, and not wanting to hold up the line backing up under the portico, I moved to a nearby parking spot, to lick my wounds and regroup. Trusty, trusty iPhone. I found the dump, almost immediately. And although my mapping app was disabled due to some lame effort on my part to avoid unwarranted tracking of my activities, to the dump and such, I could see generally where that dump was. Behind IBM, the old plant, the old part of Williston. I was suddenly game to go on a new adventure. I can’t say every moment of fighting traffic to get to the rural dump was stress-free, but suddenly my mission was this: to say good bye, to a huge piece of history. The nice young man behind the window at the solid waste management district, protected by his mask and his booth, nicely told me there would be no one to help me unload. I paid my $22, and drove to the left side of the metal bins. There, in the damp, cavernous asphalt bay of refuse, I yanked, and pushed, and strategized how to pull the couch off the truck bed, without damaging myself. To say I said goodbye to my couch, would do it a disservice. I said a mass for my couch, short and sweet. Good riddance to a fine piece of junk that I’d bought used, or actually my mother bought for me, when I was a single mom. It had at once hosted all our joys and sorrows and all our spilled liquids. I asked that it pray for me, as it would soon be crushed, whereas, I would have to live on. And cope with being marginalized by the world I’d loved. Couch pulverized & covered over. Couch owner, now couch-less, feeling disoriented, sad, maybe wiser, pretty much feeling what rural folks must have felt, as Vermont began to orient its development to please the newly minted interstates, and every paved over pasture that was to come.”
