Ruby's Sofa
We found the sofa in Gordonsville, Virginia. It sat in the sunroom of a husband and wife, in a big house hidden by oak trees down a long driveway.
It was June and I moved into my first apartment. My dad drove me there up the east coast in a U-Haul. All I wanted was a couch just like great grandmother Ruby’s, a pale yellow loveseat. The town had the greenest grass I’d ever seen. Somethings special about the way the sun shines on the earth in Gordonsville. Big oak trees everywhere that somehow never cast shadows. Like My Own Private Idaho, the opening scene with the long open road. The shadowless picture has the same artificial sunshine that feels like something unattainable.
I read a book by Joan Didion where she goes to Louisiana to “do nothing at all, but try to find out what was making that picture in my head”. You close your eyes and you’re nostalgic about something you never experienced, you see a photo that feels like a memory you can’t place. What you imagine your world could look like in a different body in a different life. I imagined freedom once and it looked like an open field in Gordonsville. Peace feels like something fell into place, you can’t remember when but it doesn’t matter anyways. A pinky promise.
Just in time for winter when the green dies, the tree outside your bedroom window is bare now. There’s nowhere you’d rather be, you’ve been to those places already and there’s only one place left to go.
