Another Writing Exercise

This is another writing exercise. What do you remember about your beds?

Beds

As I projected going from my queen bed to a twin bed in a few years, I thought of my beds throughout my life.

Of course I don’t remember what bed I slept in at Aunt Betty’s as my father finished remodeling and putting a new roof on our house. He thought he had another six weeks. Not only was the house not ready, but surprisingly there were 2 babies (twins), and now a second crib was needed.

The new cribs had a blonde faux wood grain and in the center of one end was a storybook sweater-clad golden teddy bear. That’s all I remember and that may be because we used at least one crib in the playhouse later? Even that is fuzzy, and I may be confusing the bear on the chifforobe with the crib.

I can’t picture at all the “big-girl” bed that superseded the crib. The bed that comes to mind was an upper bunk arrangement, though it wasn’t a true double bunkbed as the beds weren’t attached to nor parallel with each other. The elevated bed in which I slept allowed my twin’s single bed to partially tuck under the high raised bed at a perpendicular angle. It left floor room for our toy chests as well. This bed must have been during early elementary school years as I remember two incidents centered around it when I was 6-8 years old. A wart was burned off my little finger with an electric needle. I needed a safe comforting place to cry myself to sleep so I crawled up to my bunk during the day. Another time as I descended, my skirt got hung up on the ladder top without my realizing it until it ripped, dropping me on the floor. I sprained my wrist as I landed.

We went from the bunk arrangement to a trundle bed. Again I had the “upper” bed. I used to lay the top of my head on the mattress sort of somersaulting onto the bed. Not sure of the timing of the bunk-to-trundle transition, but this was my bed until I was 15 years old.

After my oldest sister married, I moved into her former bedroom and used the existing bed, a mattress on a wooden platform built by my father with little sliding doors covering the storage space below. It was tough to make my bed since the platform was against the wall with no way to move it out. I didn’t bring the yellow chenille bedspread but used a comforter in a pattern of squares and stripes splashed with brown, black, gray, and pale green. I called it puddle, and I still have it and bring it out sometimes for a nap.

Nothing remarkable about my succeeding beds: a dormitory twin in the Winona Hotel, a Hollywood daybed (one of two that served as couches) in my studio apartment on Wooster Road, and then my marital queen-sized bed which I am still using with mattress changes through the 40 years.

Because of fibromyalgia and back pain, I don’t sleep very well, but my beds have always been welcoming places of rest. I appreciate them.