Using setting as metaphor for the lives of your characters

Lorraine Hansberry's play A Raisin in the Sun starts off with the paragraph:

The younger living room would be a comfortable and well-ordered room if it were not for a number of indestructible contradictions to this state of being. Its furnishings are typical and undistinguished and their primary feature now is that they have clearly had to accomodate the living of too many people for too many years - and they are tired. Still, we can see that at some time, a time probably no longer remembered by the family (except perhaps for MAMA), the furnishings of this room were actually selected with care and love and even hope - and brought to this apartment and arranged with taste and pride.

This paragraph can be thought of in terms of the setting being a metaphor for the lives of characters in the story.

Write a story beginning with a metaphorical comparison between the setting and the life of one or more characters in the story. The comparison could be made by a narrator, a character, implied by the choice of words and writing style, etc.