Ding dong! Your furniture is here!

have qualified for public assistance. But we lived in a townhouse outfitted like were established bona fide adults. I looked around sometimes and wondered who lived there.

As my wife, a chip off the old block( s), walked through the girls’ new apartment, it was clear she was picturing how it could look outfitted with tons of furniture. She offered up how the love seat from our living room would go against this wall and the glass-topped garden table we kept on the deck would look in their dining area.

“Ooh, ooh! We have a four-poster bed we could bring!” The tone of her voice made it clear this was happening.

I stayed quiet. Part of this, I know, is that my wife sees being an empty nester as a way to empty out the old nest. If our love seat managed to make it out the door, I’m pretty sure we’d have to replace it with something new. And all this moving of furniture wouldn’t happen without a fair amount of groaning and straining — and I knew exactly who would be the groaner and strainer. I pictured myself balancing a love seat on my head while teetering across the lawn.

Our daughters have spent the past four years living the college life, where you get your furniture from the curb on trash day, and about a year later, you deposit that same furniture back on the curb for next year’s tenants. One of the girls had a mattress on the floor for the past year and didn’t think much of it. In college, there’s no need for a dining room table because nobody ever gets off the couch — No commitments, no responsibility, and, except for an occasional bedbug, things seem to work out pretty well.

Young people, in general, don’t seem to believe much in the value of furniture. Even when they get real jobs and a little money in their pockets, they prefer to shop at places like IKEA, where the furniture looks hip and modern in the showroom but will dissolve into a heap of crumbled particleboard the first time you try to move it. It should come with a label that says, “Best if used by …”

I suggested that the girls had been living like squatters for the past four years and what was another year or two. My wife was undeterred. This was happening.

So next week, like her parents before her, my wife will gleefully load up a pickup truck with about a half-ton of old furniture covered by a tarp, and like the Grinch roaring into Whoville after a change of heart, she will roll into town with a bounty of riches.

And I’d be riding right behind her. I just hope she doesn’t tie a reindeer horn to the top of my head.