Since moving into this Oak Spring farmhouse, built in 1902, I’ve been thinking a lot about what belongs in a house like this. Not just what looks right in it, though of course that’s part of it, but what feels right to live with. What earns its place by being useful, lasting, and becoming part of daily life.
That’s one reason I’ve been thinking about Alice Walker’s short story Everyday Use. And, more immediately, about a couch.
We just got a 1980 Rowe couch that is so nice it’s obvious the previous owners barely used it. It still has that rare quality of seeming almost untouched, and I do appreciate that. But what I’m most excited about is the opposite: watching it become an everyday object. A place for reading, napping, conversations, tired end-of-day collapse, maybe a coffee spill or two. The kind of thing that becomes more itself through use.
Everyday Use is famous for the quilts, and what has always stayed with me is the question underneath: what does it mean to value something enough to actually use it?
I have a quilt my great-grandmother Edith Fitzsimmons also made in 1980. It lives on the couch now, not as decoration exactly, though it is beautiful, but as something we use often. The stitching comes loose in places, and I mend it when it does. I want to keep it nice, of course, but not by folding it away and turning it into something to admire from a distance. Edith died when I was a newborn, so I never knew her in the way that leaves remembered conversation or shared stories. But I also have a necklace that belonged to her, with an E on it. I was the only grandchild with an E, so it came to me. It’s one of the most precious gifts I’ve ever received, and I wear it often. Wearing the necklace and using the quilt feels, in some small way, more like keeping company than preserving an heirloom.
I also have my mother’s old bundt pan, scratched and scuffed from years of use. She died in 2020 from ALS, so I inherited it much earlier than I would have hoped. I often bake with it. I also have her angel food cake pan. In my kitchen now, the two belong together: one for angel food cake with all the egg whites, one for an all-yolk cake in the bundt pan. That bundt pan holds one of my favorite memories of her: once or twice a year, I would hear absolute horror-movie screaming from another room, run to find her, and discover that she had simply spilled something—cake batter, maybe, or once an entire gallon of paint. She didn’t cry over spilled milk. She just screamed bloody murder and then kept going. She had a great scream—and made great cakes.
Those are the kinds of things I tend to love most: not untouched things, but useful ones. Things that carry wear honestly. Things that ask to be brought into daily life, not protected from it.
Maybe that’s part of why Everyday Use has stayed with me for so long. It’s a story about quilts, but also about beauty, inheritance, memory, pride, and the difference between display and use. About the difference between admiring something and living with it. About how meaning can deepen through contact.
I think about that a lot these days, living and working on a farm, in an old house full of objects that only make sense if they’re allowed to be part of real life. The best things here are rarely pristine. They are mended, worn smooth, stained, sharpened, washed, stacked, sat on, cooked in, cleaned, and used again.
So yes, I’m excited about the couch. Not because it’s too nice to use, but because I hope before long it won’t be. I hope it becomes the place where people sit too long talking, where someone falls asleep with a book, where the quilt gets pulled down on a chilly evening, where life leaves its marks.
The things we love enough to bring into Everyday Use are often the ones that mean the most.
What’s something you love enough to use? I’d love to hear.
