Treasured Trash

            The biggest lie I ever told my husband had to do with a chair.

            No, it wasn’t a fancy chair that I bought and secretly spent more on than I told him.  And no, nothing unseemly ever happened in the chair that I kept hidden from him.

             It was just a chair.

            We had bought the chair at an antique store back when “antique” was just another word for second-hand junk.  According to the person who sold it to us, the chair was an Adirondack Twig chair, and it was old and kind of rustic looking.

            After a number of years, some of the twigs broke, and the chair became a little wobbly.  It didn’t really fit in with our décor either, and so eventually it wound up in our garage.  That was when the neighborhood cats found their own use for it, and so in addition to being wobbly and broken, it positively reeked.

            I declared it trash and wanted to toss it.

            But to my husband, it was still a treasure. “It’s an Adirondack Twig chair,” he insisted.  “It’s very valuable.”

            “Tell that to the cats,” I said.

            Well, one day when my husband was out of town on business, I decided to take matters into my own paws.  On bulk pick-up day, I dragged the foul-smelling and broken chair to the sidewalk, and that was the last I ever saw of it.          

            It was almost a year before my husband noticed the chair was no longer in our garage.  And even then, I didn’t confess right away that I had trashed his treasure.

            “Oh,” I said, “it was so valuable.  I guess someone must have taken it.”

            I thought of this incident because a friend told me the other day that she had just rescued some treasures. These were things left behind by old tenants or simply thrown in her building’s storage room and forgotten. Amidst the molding junk, my friend found a few things that she secretly schlepped up to her roof garden.

            “My husband wasn’t home,” she said. “Otherwise he would have had a fit. But it’s okay – cause he’ll never know. He doesn’t go up to the garden.”

            I told her my story, and I could tell she was a little shocked that I had trashed a perfectly good chair. And I’m sure she could see me thinking, what could you possibly want with that stuff?

            But since we weren’t talking to our spouses but to each other, there was no real friction.  Funny, isn’t it, how we’re so much more tolerant of differences in people we’re not related to?  Okay, so maybe in some marriages, both spouses are pack rats or trashers, but more often, we decided, opposites attract.

            So I guess in the final analysis it’s okay if we trash each other’s treasures – as long as we treasure each other.