Kitchen table optional

It's carpet cleaning day here at Chez Fox and as I sit here in the kitchen, surrounded by furniture and plants, lamps and decorative doo-dads, I can't help but wonder - where did I get all this stuff?

Yes, it's been a few (ahem) decades since I graduated college and went home with a mini-fridge and a duffel bag filled with clothes and picture frames, but to rise to this level of domestic tackle - it's almost like I tried. But I didn't. No, I remember moving into that first post-college apartment and having to invent furniture. You know, the box that works as an end table. An old door for a desk. And who really needed a kitchen table when the Lean Cuisine plastic plate fit perfectly onto the back of a Cosmo magazine? Lap food! There was no prep, no clean up and no real furniture required.

Hmm...maybe I do miss those days - at least the no cooking part.

Now, I'm sitting next to a glass hurricane bowl filled with fake cherries, resting on an antique end table that probably cost more than my first couch. In fact, I know it did. My first couch was $100 and it came from a re-possessed furniture store. It was awesome. We could buy other people's re-possessed rentals for a fraction of the cost! My roommate and I furnished our entire apartment that way. The kicker was, nobody could tell unless we told them. Of course, we told everyone. We were so proud.

And still, when I moved to my own place a few years later, all it took was my brother's truck and a few guy friends willing to work for pizza and beer. But then, I don't know how it happened. But I got married and started a family and now I have...stuff.

Maybe it is a sign of being more mature. Maybe I'll go through these things with more of an eye before putting them back, just to make sure I need each of them. After all, there's more to life that stuff.