Life in 3 — The One About What I Found in the Sofa

J Dana Stahl
2 min readJun 7, 2022

I’ve recently discovered that you can tell a whole lot about a person — and a family — simply by reaching your hand down into the side of their sofa and rooting around for treasure. Now, you have to be brave and reach really, really deep…like up to the elbow, so if there are kids OF ANY AGE in the home, say a little prayer and cross your fingers that there’s nothing alive in the crevices.

Picture of sofa stuffed full of trash from teenagers on summer break.

We Are a Clean People

I feel like I need to put that out there, because what I’m about to tell you might land us on an episode of Hoarders or, at a bare minimum, on some sort of shameful internet list mocking families who find pizza crust in weird places.

That being said, it’s become clear that the contents stuffed into the depths of your sofa say a WHOLE LOT about what’s going on in the house. We have two teenage boys still at home. Here’s what I found in our sofa today:

1. 17 mismatched socks. Contrary to popular belief, we DO have a laundry room with a fully functioning washer and dryer. However, our teenage sons seem to have either forgotten its location and/or how to work the very complicated machines.

2. Miscellaneous snack wrappers and 3 plastic drink bottles. And a whole LOT of crumbs. I can’t adequately describe the sensation of reaching deep into the sofa only to…

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J Dana Stahl

I’m a dreamer who believes there might just be a smidgeon of good left in this world. I believe in being nice, playing fair, and tacos...lots of tacos.