An Essay About Roadside Ministry, a Title Inspired by Harlan Ellison
The first piece of furniture I ever saved I was in college. My roommate Sarah and I were moving out of the dorms and into our first apartment. We left the building for the last time, a few items in our hands, and lo-and-behold, in the college dumpster area sat a love seat. It wasn’t the prettiest thing in the world, but it was clean (mostly) and free. We couldn’t believe our luck! Someone had already paid the university the fee of dumping it there, but we weren’t about to leave it behind. We had virtually no furniture in our place.
The only trouble was, we had no vehicle that could transport it. So we did what any desperate college students would do: we put our items on the seat of the couch and each hoisted up an end. Our apartment was three blocks away. But it was really heavy, and my back was out. We would make it half a block and then have to rest. I remember thinking, where are all of the chauvinist male students who think women are pale, delicate flowers who can’t even open a door when you actually need them? We did have one fine young man who was driving past help us with the last block of the distance, he said his grandmother would never forgive him if he hadn’t stopped. And we met our neighbor, Mohamed, when he helped us haul it up to the fourth floor and he was really the only neighbor we ever befriended. That was a great little couch, ugly, but super comfy. It was sad when it didn’t fit in our moving truck and we had to leave it in Minneapolis.
A History of (Re)-Purpose
When Daniel and I were in our second year of marriage we moved to Lake Mills. I was working at this little cafe in the outlet mall, right next to a Pfaltzgraff store. That was when my dumpster-diving kicked up a notch, into occasionally literally diving into the dumpster to bring out treasures. I couldn’t get over the wastefulness of that store. If they had a display set of dishware out and something broke or was stolen, they would throw the whole set away! We furnished not only our kitchen, but also the kitchen of many friends through that dumpster. What did a bunch of broke twenty-year-olds care if they were one fork short or one glass shy of a set?
It was nicer stuff than we would ever afford ourselves.
In the seventeen years of our marriage, Daniel and I have never been financially well off. We have always lived on a very minimal income and there have been many times we haven’t known where the money would come from for the next round of bills. God has always provided everything we have needed, and a great deal of things we’ve just wanted. One of the ways He has provided has been by the discarding of furniture on the side of the roads. Whitewater has proven to be a town that goes through a lot of furniture. College students buy furniture for temporary homes and discard it when they move away.
Why get a moving truck if you are going back home to mom and dad and have nowhere to put it anyways?
