What's 'green' and lumpy all over? Carbon footprint of her old couch

Tag : tree strap
years ago. She bought them in 1958, for her first patio when shewas a young married woman in Fontana. (My mother hates that thecouch is outside for the third year, and all that it portends.) Butwe don't have an outdoor room. We have a front yard.
We throw about six parties every summer in the front yard. Threebirthdays, Fourth of July and various no-reason-at-all celebrationsthat feature foosball and pingpong. Food on the picnic table. Sodasin an old green-plastic turtle sandbox filled with ice. A boomboxon the porch. (The stereo system? Set up on the porch? So muchtrouble.) Under the tree, the couch with five or six kids crowdedon.
The week before my eldest turned 19, the week before we celebratedher birthday with a front yard party, she went to a backyard partywhere the newly elaborate decor and landscaping included a copperfire pit that blazed on top of a fountain (which I find hard tovisualize) surrounded by formal furniture and rugs, a manicuredputting green, a volleyball court and a new saltwater pool.
The next morning, she described it to her sisters and me while Imade pancakes. "All the work it would take to do that," I said."And all the concrete and material from the old yard in a landfill.All that new stuff."
"We're so green," my youngest said, kind of smug because we wereeating eggs from our chickens and blackberries from our yard, andwe weren't filling up a landfill.
But I realized suddenly why our carbon footprint is so small:"That's because I'm way too lazy to renovate," I said.
"We are incredible slackers," my eldest agreed.
"Wait," she added. "It's not that we're lazy, we're like theMarches, in 'Little Women.' We think this is OK, to not care. Wethink this is a good thing."
"I guess," I said, stirring. "I guess we're kind oftranscendentalist."
"Wait," she said again. "It's not just that. Look at what I'mwearing." She was wearing a red-checked sundress I'd seen all lastyear on her friend. They'd traded.
"Look at your bowl." The mixing bowl holding pancake batter wasbought for me by my mother, when I was a newly married 22. I wishit appeared heirloom-like - the burnt-orange color, wheat motif andKmart origin make that impossible. I use it almost every day, eventhough I don't like it. "That's why we're green. We have absolutelyno pride. We just don't care enough."
Our eldest daughter is right. We practice a sort of a weirdSouthern California transcendentalism that doesn't fit in withAmerican upward mobility, increasing our equity or impressing ourfriends.
But this absence of pride also is tempered by nostalgia, which Imust keep hidden or risk awful teenage ridicule.
I love that picnic table because my brothers and I used to eatthere, and one of my brothers is gone now. I love that couchbecause of all those teenagers who have slept on it in my livingroom, their faces for once at rest from the studying and arguingand worrying and belittling at which they excel.
If this is how you get really, really green, I'm OK with it. Irecommend it. I watch the warm breeze move their hair. I have maybeone more summer with my teenagers and their friends, the lacy shadeof branches across their faces, reminding me of what true comfortand freedom, and an absolute inability to care, are all about.