Ugly November and My Furniture Problem

November has rolled around again as it inevitably does, and here it comes: my birthday. Every year without fail it comes barreling down the freeway of my life bringing with it all the detritus of my years which includes—unhappily and shamefully—my furniture problem.

Each November I re-arrange furniture all over my house. I move rugs from one floor to another and empty bookcases and swap them with ones from another room. I have even moved my bed from one wall to another and then back again–and Paul never even knew it happened.

November is a hussy who whispers in my ear, ‘here we go again. Another year you haven’t lost ten pounds, another year you haven’t finished a new book, another year your family is growing without you.’ My birthday month is the eleventh of the year. It has none of the excitement of Month 1: New Years! new start! OR Month 12: Cozy Christmas and hot toddies.

November slaps me in the face with dead, wet flower beds, winds that scream up the inlet and threaten to rip off my roof, and rain, lots of it. I can’t really blame my birthday month for the weather, however. I do live in the Pacific Northwest.

Weather be damned. I know how to defeat the Novembers of my life. My mother taught me a wonderful trick using towels to move furniture. Just lift one end of a couch, shove a towel under both feet, do the same at the other end, and you can merrily push a giant couch around a room like it was shopping cart. I have even perfected the towel solution on stairs. Lay down thick blankets, turn the desk on its back and slide it down the stairs without a scratch. So many things take place while Paul is at work…

Sadly, moving my old furniture to new places only satisfies my need for escape for so long. Then an itch comes to buy new furniture and, of course, there is the need to sell old furniture. It’s like an infinity ring. It goes and comes full circle again and again. If I was a thoughtful, planning kind of person, this could all be accomplished in a time like Month 4: April. Nothing happens in April.

I swear, the furniture itch becomes a frenzy the minute I put away the Halloween decorations. All Souls Day dawns wet and miserable and I rise from bed with a single goal: get new furniture. If I attempt to psycho-analyze myself, furniture becomes the symbol of distraction. Creating the perfect room with the right colors, feeling of whimsy, and solidness of wood hides my fear of growing a year older. I can’t stop the onslaught of time, but the purchase of a beautiful buffet and hutch can make me feel better. It’s a high I can ride for a long time. At least past Christmas.

A dear friend said to me this summer, ‘I love your house. There are so many odds and ends and inherited things, it’s just you.’ It was a compliment I know, but it haunted me. If only she knew. I own a teal rug that was my mother’s, and I had to promise to keep it for life; I have an entertainment center I painted dark navy blue–Lady Sings the Blues–last November, and it hulks in the corner of my family room like a cave; I have lamp shades that have to be turned delicately so you won’t see the scars of their previous lives at Goodwill.

I did a terrible thing ten years ago. Chalk paint. It’s where you take a perfectly good piece of wood furniture, and you paint it a color like Robin Egg Blue, Versailles Green, or Lady Sings the Blues. I have all three colors in my house. Paul even had a high boy with thirteen drawers, and I painted them different colors. It was cool. Until it wasn’t.

I am stuck with the Lady Sings the Blues entertainment center, but I am ready to discard my Versailles Green bookcase that was once a beautiful cherry wood.

“So, you see,” I explained to Paul sweeping my arm across the span of our living room. “In a well-dressed room, solid, matching furniture anchors the space and allows your eye to travel from one vignette to another.” I lifted my eyebrows and shifted my head to the corner of the room.

“I don’t see the problem.”

“The bookcase. It’s green.”

“You painted it.”

“I know. It was a mistake.”

Paul raised his eyebrows and pointed back over his shoulder to the family room.

“Yes, I realize the navy blue entertainment center is quite intense, but I am not interested in touching that this year.” My voice remained calm. “I want this hutch and buffet. This lady had it online last summer for $1700, now it’s down to $1200, and I bet I can get her to knock off another $100. I know how to work FBM.” Paul tilted his head to the side.

“Facebook Marketplace, of course.”

“Of course.”

I held up a finger in warning. He went silent.

“I’m going to West Seattle tomorrow to view it. If I like it, I will give her a deposit and we can pick it up after we get home from vacation.” Oh yes, did I mention that? We’re going on a two-week vacation in a few days, I’m having a birthday dinner party on Saturday, and I have yet to get a pedicure. Priorities, Lesley…but it was November.  

I didn’t clean my car before I left on the 70-mile trip to West Seattle. There were the usuals: a bag of ten bathing suits and their matching cover ups for Goodwill, two mysterious wire baskets begging to become a new project, and a quilt. Quilts are a touchy subject in our house. I have 57 of them. But do you know how much a good Pottery Barn Kids quilt is worth? When the grandkids come they can have a new one on their bed every day for a month. If they ever stay a month…

I got to “Bobbi’s” house (some people have fake names on FBM), and it was a three-story, multi-million-dollar abode with views of Seattle, the Olympic Mountains, and Vashon Island. Solid wood furniture anchored every room, cashmere throws were tossed with abandon on the edges of couches, and I didn’t see any odds and ends. It was perfect. So was she. There wasn’t a wrinkle on her face, her hair was that silver platinum that looked good enough it might not be a dye job, and she was barefoot. Even her painted toes looked effortless.

 “It’s down here in the basement,” she called as she swept down the stairs. There it was. It was even better in real life. Sixty-five inches wide by eighty-eight inches tall, the Stanley Villa Library Bookcase was solid, timeless, elegant, forever. It was everything I wanted to be.

“Do you have any room in your price?” I asked innocently.

“Do you know much this is discounted already?” Her eyes darted with fire.

“How about $1100? That way I can tell my husband I got a great deal.”

“Fine. But I want it to be through Zelle. I don’t do Venmo.”

I sat down on the edge of her Restoration Hardware white, duck cloth couch and prayed I knew our username and password to Wells Fargo. While I typed away, she removed all of her collectibles from each of the sixteen cubby holes. I noticed they had Home Goods stickers on the bottom of them. My stomach rumbled a bit. I started to sweat. Why was she moving her things off the hutch? Didn’t I tell her I couldn’t come back for two weeks?

Now, there are lots of kinds of sweat—clean running sweat, hot summer day sweat, but there is one sweat that is like a runaway train. Nervous sweat can fill a room with its pungent odor. It’s a wrinkle-your- nose, move-away-from-the-person, wonder-why-they-aren’t-wearing-deodorant kind of sweat. It had a name: fear sweat. Out of control sweat. November Furniture Problem sweat. I was wearing a cashmere sweater. You could almost see the sweat climbing out between the fuzz. I was nervous. I was fearful. I stunk up the room. It was bad.

“Okay, let’s move this.” She grabbed one side of the buffet/hutch combo. It towered over her head.

“I can’t pick it up right now,” I stammered. “I was hoping you’d hold it until we get back.”

“Why don’t you take the bottom half now and come back for the top on Saturday?” she demanded. She tapped her tanned, bare foot with the tiny, painted toes on the couch cushion.

“I guess I could do that.” How long does it take to cook a prime rib? How many people was I having for my birthday party? Maybe my neighbors could come over and turn on the oven for the prime rib. If they put it on low, maybe I could pull this off.

I went over to the other side of the buffet/hutch. It was mine now. If anything happened, she had my money, and I had this humungous piece of furniture that needed professional movers not two fifty-something year olds with flabby arms.

“Lift the top off,” she instructed. “We’ll put it down and then move the buffet.” We both strained at our corners. It lifted two inches. “Come on, you can do this, right?” She lifted her side, and I lifted my side with bent knees and shaking legs. Then Bobbi decided to step over the corner of the couch while carrying her side. I saw the top of the hutch begin to tip, its crown molding the first to go. My mouth opened to scream, but it was too late. The eighty-eight inch hutch crashed onto Bobbi and pinned her onto the crisp, white couch. The glass shelves fell and shattered around her. She was silent and didn’t move.

In addition to fear sweat, I have another horrible habit. I laugh in really bad situations. I laugh cruelly when someone slips on the ice, or falls into the bushes, or farts in a quiet room. I can’t help it.  I began to feel it bubbling from the bottom of my gut and I dug my fingernails into my sweaty palms. “No,” I growled inside my head. “You can’t do that.”

But Bobbi looked like the wicked witch in the Wizard of Oz after Dorothy’s house fell on her. All I could see were her legs sticking out. She began to move under the huge hutch.

“Bobbi,” I yelled. “Don’t move. There is glass everywhere.”

“My shoes,” I heard her mumble underneath the Stanley Villa Library Bookcase.

I dug around in a hallway and grabbed the shoes. When I got back, she had pushed the hutch so it was standing on the carpet. Her face was white, and she looked dazed. I looked away as she put her shoes on. I couldn’t look at her. I knew I would start giggling and that would be bad. Terribly bad. I carefully picked up all the big shards of glass and put them on the wet bar.

“Where is your vacuum?” I whispered.

“I’ll do it later.” Suddenly she looked old and tired. She had wrinkles just like me. “I was in an accident and destroyed my knee. I couldn’t even come down here. That’s why I am selling it. I’m sorry, but you’ll have to get new glass for the shelves.” I nodded miserably.

Don’t ask me how we did it, but we got the buffet into my car. I wrapped my grandkids’ new Value Village Pottery Barn quilt around the massive bulk, and I squeezed the bathing suits and coverups into the nooks and crannies of the cubbies.  

I cried all the way home. It took two hours and eleven minutes to drive the seventy miles from West Seattle to Olympia in rush hour traffic. I drove in the slow lane because I knew if I had to slam on the brakes that thing was going to shoot out the front window like a casket out of a hearse. I cursed my November Furniture problem. It had seemed like such a lark. Just drive to West Seattle, negotiate a deal, pick it up two weeks later when I would be tan and my hair would be bleached. Now I had half a piece of furniture with broken shelves. A woman had been injured because I hadn’t spoken up and said, “we do not have the skills to lift this furniture.” Now I was going to have to rent a U-Haul truck, beg Paul to come with me, cook a birthday dinner in absentia, and, most grating of all, live with the Stanley Villa Library Bookcase forever. It was never coming out of my house. No one would be able to move it. My birthday had won again. It had defeated me.

I know the only escape from impending birthdays is the final goodbye. The vignettes of my life, (the odds and ends) bring me the thrill of the chase and the satisfaction of the deal. Almost everything I own is second hand. There is a tale behind every nick, scratch, broken shelf, stain, and loosened thread. They are evidence of a life lived well. My November furniture problem rears its ugly head once a year as a reminder to keep moving, fix the broken, do away with the no longer needed, and even, sometimes, buy something new. New to me, of course, and always brimming with a story.

Poor Bobbi.

Postscript: I originally published this essay a year ago. I still suffer from my November Furniture problem. This year I switched my two guest rooms and moved my grandkids’ bunkbeds and a murphy bed downstairs while moving a double bed and all of our exercise equipment upstairs. Oh…and I also moved the Lady Sings the Blues (navy blue) entertainment center upstairs. I ditched the towel trick and asked Paul for his help on that furniture move. I’m not stupid. I don’t want to end up laying underneath a bemouth bookcase looking like the wicked witch of the Wizard of Oz.