Scott Franco

How much do you love your wife?

I am asking all of you who are married, or who may be planning on getting married one day, so that I can share a story with you. Or, maybe after reading this, you might not want to get married — but I am just kidding, sort of.

My wife Ann Marie and I recently celebrated our 31st wedding anniversary in June with a nice meal out on the town, and then we did what other couples do when they celebrate their nuptials — they buy furniture. At least that is what we do.

Yep. Bought a new couch, love seat and chair, but don’t get me wrong, we needed all three pieces. The furniture we owned had out-lived its time here on earth — and in our living room. Parts of it were simply falling apart. But my wife is good at extending the life cycle of inanimate objects. For instance, where the one portion of the couch had collapsed, she propped it up with a box of books underneath its base.

However, pity the fool who did not know that and plopped down on that section of the couch to watch some college football in the fall. Ouch!

It even got to the point where our three cats and two dogs were kind of embarrassed by the furniture and refused to even lay on them for fear the neighborhood felines and canines would mock them at neighborhood get-togethers.

OK, so you get the point — old furniture bad. Old furniture must go.

We purchased a 3-piece set that she loved. It is very comfortable and very affordable … and very big.

Correction, the couch is very big, the other two pieces fit into our home perfectly. You see, the couch did not. The movers tried the front door and the side door. They really stayed as long as they could but it was a no go. The back door was also out of the question. Well, I guess we will have to send it back and get another couch.

Not an option for Mrs. Franco. She loved the couch. She said it was the one piece of furniture that sold the entire suit on her. Women! Couches?

At this point in my column, I would like to say that in my 40 years of working at the paper, and 15-plus years of writing this humor column, I never thought I would get an entire column out of a couch … but here we go.

She wanted to know if we could hire someone to remove our bay window in our living room and lift the couch through that space and into the house, and then put the window back. I thought there was no way.

Way.

My best friend (John Dibert, who gets way too much publicity in this space each year) came in to see our living room, with the two pieces of furniture, and did I mention the new sanded, varnished floor that my wife also had a big part in putting together this summer?

John looked at me. He looked at the window and said, “You must really love your wife if you do this.”

I do.

I actually liked where we were storing the couch while waiting on the window guys — in our dining room, and though it was a bit snug in there, it fit … kind of. For Thanksgiving, we usually host 29 people and because of how big the couch is, that thing can seat four people, five if one of them were not built like me. So, technically, we could have kept it there. But physically, my wife would kill me if we had to do that.

My son Vincent asked me if we were really going to try this window thing, and I said “Your mom never asks for anything. She really wants this couch.”

Vincent then points out that she asked for the third cat and the second dog, things she wanted but that I did not. We got them. Let me point out that she does let me listen to Stevie Nicks and Michael McDonald CDs in the car when we are traveling, and she loathes those two voices. You see, marriage really is give and take.

But I digress.

So you know what? We found two gentlemen whom we hired for the job. They showed up on a Tuesday morning with gadgets and God bless them, they removed the big window, placed it down on the ground outside, then, along with Vincent, the three of them lifted the giant couch through the window, and into the heart of our living room, and into my wife’s heart, too. Put the window in and all was good.

I looked at the one guy and said, “You just made my wife’s day by doing that.” He looked back at me and said without missing a beat, “I just made the rest of your life easy by doing that.”

I had to agree.