The comparison that keeps coming up is the green sling one from a few summers back against the newer gray textilene version currently annoying somebody on the back patio, and honestly it should not be this close a fight. The green one was cheap, wobbled if you looked at it wrong, and still gets talked about fondly, which tells you something about what actually matters here.
The gray one folds flatter, that much is true, and for about two weeks it felt like an upgrade. Then the leaves started. Not a lot, just enough to collect in the little gap where the headrest meets the seat, and nobody wants to be the one fishing wet foliage out of a lounger with a butter knife at nine in the morning, but somebody always ends up doing it.
Bird mess is its own separate conversation and we are having it now. One side of the group treats it as background noise, a hose down once a week, done, move on with your life. The other side keeps a specific cloth for it, kept separate from the other cloths, and gets genuinely offended when someone else uses it for anything, including cleaning up spilled coffee, which happened once and has been mentioned at least four times since.
The dirt is the quieter enemy.
It doesn’t announce itself the way a bird does. It just builds up in the fold lines and the little plastic joints where the frame hinges, and one day you go to wipe it down and realize the cloth has gone from white to a color that doesn’t have a name.
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Where the real argument sits is comfort versus convenience, and it hasn’t been settled in three summers of trying. The green one sagged in exactly the right place for an afternoon nap and folded like it resented every second of it, took two people and a small amount of shouting.
The gray one folds one handed, genuinely, which sounds minor until you’re carrying a drink and a phone and trying not to wake anybody up. But it sits flatter than it should, and the person who naps most in this house has never fully forgiven it for that.
We’d skip buying based on the fold mechanism sounding impressive in a shop, because that’s exactly how we ended up with the gray one, and it’s fine, it’s just not the one anyone actually fights over borrowing.
What we’d actually pay attention to next time is how it copes with being left out, because it always gets left out, nobody remembers to bring loungers in until the sky already looks bad. The one that shrugs off a night of rain and a light dusting of whatever the tree above it drops that week wins, every time, over the one that folds like it’s auditioning for a catalogue.
[…] Next time round we’d probably split the difference, that solid weight from the older stand, this color, and somebody else’s drawers. Nobody’s found that one yet. We’re still looking, and still arguing about whether it exists. […]