Look at the pillow on the chair. The pillow is gold. There is a dragonfly on it: blue-green and silvery-white. The chair is beige. The arms and legs of the chair are made of wood. You acquired this chair for free. When you brought it home you realized it smelled strongly of cigarette smoke. You would not have acquired this chair, even though it was free, had you realized sooner that it smelled of cigarettes. At any rate the chair was yours now, and you'd gone to significant effort—driving three hours round trip with a bouncing trailer hooked up to the CRV's trailer hitch—to obtain it along with some other free furniture that also, unexpectedly and inconveniently, smelled of cigarettes. You left the chair in the driveway and did some research on the laptop. You drove to Lowe's and purchased vinegar and a special deodorizing spray that they use in hospitals. At least that's what the internet said. You scrubbed the chair with a rag soaked in vinegar, but it still smelled of cigarettes. Next you soaked the chair with the special spray. That helped. You sprayed a second round and that seemed to do the trick, though you couldn't be certain because by that point the smell of cigarettes had taken up residence in your nostrils. You left the chair to dry in the sun. When you checked on the chair a few hours later, the chair's frame had dried but the seat cushion was still wet. You brought the chair frame into the garage and left the seat cushion sitting on the grass in the sun. Then an unexpected thunderstorm rolled through the summer yard. The seat cushion was soaked far wetter than before. You left it in the yard because you weren't sure what else to do with it. You thought maybe it would get sunny again and the seat cushion would dry. Instead it poured again, and the seat cushion became still more waterlogged and a bit muddy. You spread a contractor bag on the garage floor, then carried the seat cushion into the garage and laid it on top of the waterproof surface. By that point you were pretty tired from scrubbing the chair and all the other free furniture you'd acquired, so you thought you'd figure out what to do with the seat cushion tomorrow. Truth be told you neglected it for several days. By that point pink mold had spread across the cushion. It was pretty gross. You didn't know how to get rid of it, or if the seat cushion would be safe to use moving forward, and frankly you didn't want to touch it. So you threw away the seat cushion. Now you were left with a bare chair frame that smelled only faintly, if at all, of cigarettes. You did some more research and eventually reached out to a man in Ukraine who makes cushions. Per his instructions, you measured the chair's frame in several places and selected a color that seemed like it was most likely to match the remaining fabric on the chair's back: oatmeal. You paid $90 and in a few weeks the seat cushion traveled from Ukraine to your driveway. You opened the package and were impressed by the quality of the seat cushion's construction. The dimensions were perfect. The color match was pretty close, though the fabric textures were a little different. Placing a pillow on the chair would help bridge the two colors and fabrics. A person would have to look pretty closely to realize the seat cushion sitting on the chair wasn't the chair's original seat cushion. You did some more research and after much deliberation selected a golden pillow with a dragonfly on it. It was quite expensive for a pillow. You wouldn't normally pay that much. But you thought it would be worth the price, just this once, given how perfectly the pillow would tie the chair together while cohering with the rest of the room's decoration. You paid $60 and the pillow arrived in eight days.
