beds

Music: Mott the Hoople: All the Young Dudes (1972/2006 remaster)

It's taken me a while to get settled back into home life after a week of traveling and lots of driving. Dale helped me unload the van and lug grandmother's stuff into the spare room. It took me a few days to figure out where to store all the stuff I had crammed in that bedroom, but after a few days I've finally cleared it out and re-assembled granny's stuff. The guest room is not large, so I had to figure and refigure the configure to get the three pieces just right.

The bed is a full sized bed, and my old bed and box spring mattress fit into it snugly. The only place for the dresser was right next to it. You can see at the bottom of each piece that it is chipped (I guess from various vacuum cleaner bang-ups; my mother, her sister, and my grandmother are all "clean freaks"; you can get a closer look by clicking on the images). I put my old bed stuff on it and I think it looks fine. No, my sheets are not always so tidy. I decided to procrastinate one day by ironing and starching the tops of the sheets and some of the pillow cases in the event Southern Living magazine wanted to do a special feature on granny's relocated stuff. It's not like I know of any impending guests any time soon, so I might as well make it look pretty.

The thing where ladies do their hair and make up (is that called a vanity?) is off to the side. I was worried the mirror would get cracked on the way, but looks like we packed it well. That telephone used to be in my bedroom, but it seriously looks better in the guest room now. The furniture was purchased in 1939 when my grandmother and grandfather married.

Finally! My new bed arrived! With part of my summer teaching money I bought a king size bed. It's one of them fancy memory foam things, though not the Temper-pedic cause they're too expensive. This is a Sealy TrueFoam thing. Anyhoo, I'm still having trouble getting used to it, and I think it's a bit hot so I might have to by a cooling mattress pad, but it's comfortable and supposed to last me 20 years. The bedspread and pillows are all new too, an ebay find of all this stuff in one "lot": bedskirt, everything. It's supposed to be "plum," but it's almost black, so I bought some purple pillows to make it look less "dark." Whatever: I'll just go to bed singing "Undead, undead, undead." I'm still a gothic dark soul at heart . . . . At the Hole in the Wall celebrating a student's successful Ph.D. defense, I was telling colleagues about my sleepy-time purchase. "Why a king? That's so huge," said a buddy.

"Well, I like all that room and, you know, it gets hot when there is more than one person in there."

"Oh, what's that? Like the field of dreams? Build it and they will come?"

"Absolutely," I said. "And I hope in more ways than one!"

It was funny, I swear it was. But maybe you had to be there.