Meditations. Not About Sleeping

When I was about five my mom taught me to make my bed by myself. A new sister was sucking up all the available energy and my mom needed more help. Also, she always liked teaching me to do stuff for myself. This trait must pass in the maternal line and she passed it to me. What would you do, how would you spell it, what is your plan, what have you tried so far, what do you think? Trying to get my kids to do it for themselves. Anyway, there I was at five, standing on the wall side of my pulled-out-from-the-wall bed, and my mom on the room side introducing me to doing this for myself. Her making the bed with forward, introduction, footnotes, commentary, afterward and bibliography; me making copious mental notes and frantic mnemonic devices. I'm doing this alone next time and forever after and who would ever have guessed there was a method, an order to it, a system, standards?

I have such a sharp little memory of those first solo days, standing at the bottom corner of my bed where I'd have to push myself between it and the wall, surveying the vast bedscape in the deep despair of someone too, too short for the task at hand. There was just so much of it and it had, somehow, I didn't remember how, become so chaotic in the night, seemingly without my cooperation or even permission. I was too short to see across the hugeness of the twin bed (called twin because the other little sister, not the new demanding one, had a bed exactly like it across the room from mine); I mean, I could see that there was another side to my bed but not all the way over the far edge. Any wandering thing of about my own size or smaller could have crouched on the yonder side in the triangle point where bed came to floor, unseen till I made my small-steps way around to push or pull whatever bedclothes layer came next in the straightening process, and if that crouching thing were a nasty thing (as seemed all too likely when I was five years old and laboring mightily all alone in my room making an enormous bed for seven hours every day) then at my approach the croucher might just scuttle, chuckling, to the next side around, keeping cunningly ahead of my small self, making no noise other than the very same soft rustling of sheets that my bed-making was making, too. Or so it seemed to me.

Traveling miles round and round acres of twin bed is what I remember most from those early days of bedmaking, toiling from one side of the bed to the other working the sheet (pull up this side, progress around the bed which has been shoved away from the wall, now pull up the other side), then the blanket, (pull on this side, journey to the bed's other side, pull, straighten, smooth), fold the sheet top over the blanket top (plod around to fold down the sheet top on the other side), haul away on the bedspread which outweighed me by about half (pull up on this side, walk, walk, pull up on the other and fold down, alllll the way around again to the far edge of the world, fold down on that side too), place the pillow, fold bedspread over pillow on this side (trek back to cover the pillow on the other side), smooth the whole surface (the size of Connecticut), push the bed back against the wall. I thought I was pretty good at it when all was said and done, as good as my mom, anyway, but the process took too much of my days and left me so winded I traditionally treated myself to a rest for a while after, lying on the floor alongside my newly neatened bed, looking carefully through the bedspread tassels to the under of my bed where so many brave belongings lived and protected me, colonists courageously holding the line, preventing any evil developing in the underscape. Thinking about it now that I am old, I'm no way sure my belongings were feeling courageous in their hearts. Bravery is all tangled up with volition and free will. My toys and clothes and trash were probably being brave the way Greek slaves thunked down in a colony on the edge of the empire and held there at sword point were brave. If you can't leave the scary hinterlands into which you've been placed, well, you've still got to raise your crops and your children and when the barbarians come a-marauding you take up the sword to defend as best you can the place where you're stuck. If your sword also protects the people living fat and happy in the heartland capitol and they call you brave and a hero, goody for them. I had set my lesser treasures in the underbed to protect me and they couldn't leave. My heroes.

Evil lurking belowdecks was a real and constant danger, and all due to those cursed thick bedspread tassels. We all, the little sister, myself and even my parents, had extreme bedspreads my grandmother sent us from Italy. The wool of a thousand wildly hairy sheep. The shipping must have been horrendous; they weighed the earth, it was like sleeping under one of those lead blankets they cuddle on you in x-ray rooms, only huge. Like the beautiful glass paperweight with the glass flower garden in its bottom that my grandparents sent from Murano, only instead of going on stacks of papers on a desk, these went on the beds to keep sheets and blankets and sisters from blowing away when strong winds swept through our house, say, on account of a carelessly opened door. Bedweights. In unimaginably far off Italy, Grandma still knew about the Santa Ana winds and prepared us accordingly. My parents' gold and white spread must have been bespoke, must have been custom made for their California king size bed. The little sister and I had spreads with big fat florals worked in blood red and its sister color, blood pink, heavily woven and ending in thick, thick tassels all around the bottom. (I needn't even mention that if people, certainly small girls, are going to brave the harsh winters of southern California they will surely require monstrous wool tapestries harvested from medieval Italian castles if they even hope to stay alive through the bitter nights. It's common knowledge.)

During daylight hours those tassels were a gift, indispensable for endless braiding practice, a life skill at which doughty orphans, enchanted princesses, sea captains' brave daughters and any other girl of merit possessing long hair or little sisters must exhibit great mastery and cunning. But at night, oh, at night any vile, bloodthirsty or vicious thingy (it needn't even be tiny, just small enough in one of its dimensions to snick into the underbed) might silently, gently slide its hands or paws or talons between and then softly around two of those puffy, bloody-pinky wool tails, push them soundlessly aside and come swaggering out like a mean teenager through a bamboo bead bedroom-door curtain (I had seen such teenagers on television) while I, far above in the dead center of my bed, held down helpless beneath the spread and all unawares in the dark, would be hard pressed to spot the beasty so I could scream before it fairly came upon me. And all the while I knew, unkindest cut of all, those same weak and silly tassels were simply withholding, by a whim of their structure, the stout nighttime protection a sensible, solid, all-the-way-to-the-floor spread (a quilt for instance, and this explains our ancestors' reliance on them) would by its very nature have provided, sweeping unbroken to the carpet on all sides of my bed, containing and confining the under ghouls behind dependable continuous fabric walls (which is why in castles they're called curtain walls (what a lot we're learning today!)). Burdened as I was managing those the treacherous tassels, self protection alone led me to encourage, nay, require aggressive underbed development and my bedroom planning and zoning committees allowed absolutely solid population density in such an at-risk area. My mom, capable in so many arenas, has an oddly difficult time grasping planning principles like these and this was a sore spot between us for years. My own children slept in beds I had built for them that have no under at all. In fact, if you look through my house what you won't see is much under. I like furniture solid all the way to the ground. Who needs dust and lost shoes and forgotten library books and spider holes and child-begotten food storage and hauntings? Under is just asking for trouble.

So are top sheets on beds. As good as the best gifts the painter has given me is the culture of the duvet, though in this house we call them by their Danish name which I'm far too indolent to try and figure out how to reproduce here. Growing up in my mother's house I never knew, never had any idea, about such things. Learning to pull up and fold down sheets at five years old, my construct of heaven had people sleeping under big soft quilts, like you do when you are lying sick on the sofa with a thermometer or when you take a nap, with nary a top sheet or woolen bedweight in sight. My mama may have sympathized but she told me, rightly, that the quilts would become dirty used in such a disrespectful manner and need near constant washing which would wear them out before their time. I bowed to this unanswerable wisdom while I lived at home but when I went to college the same grandmother who had sent the tormenting Italian tassels into my little life made me a cheerful new going-away-from-home quilt (she had taken up quilt making and transformed seamlessly from the source of night-terror producing bedweights to a maker of round-the-bed all-night protection) under which I brazenly slept with absolutely no top sheet whatever. Sizzle. And washed it accordingly. I still have that quilt, it looks like a leaf skeleton. My children sleep under duvets in the winter, quilts in the summer. Pull it up, smooth it out and it's made. The quilts do have to be washed often and no, they won't live long, they are brave heroes of our lives, buying us precious lifetime with lost years of quilt usefulness, courageous because they have to be.

But. The youngest has a tiny room right now and is sleeping against the ceiling with her desk and bureau and lounging space in an under so big it is transformed to something else all together, a room of its own. The middle one, in her new larger room, asked for the double bed she long ago unearthed dusty and rusty in a crazy shed in a deep backlot in Kanosh. She now has an under at once too small for storage and just big enough to suck up forever expensive dance shoes. The oldest sleeps across the world from us in whatever is missionary issue in Hong Kong. And this summer the painter confessed he prefers sleeping under a sheet in hot weather and I have found a quilt I like to have on the bed right now...so. Pull up and smooth, walk around allllll the way to the other side, repeat ad nauseum. The bed proportionately as large, now that I am grown and it is a king, as it ever was. I try always to remember to get the painter to help me make our bed before he leaves for the other house. It's far more than twice the work for one person to make a king sized bed than it is for two, but once it's tidy I can make the bed while he's gone with less effort than I use making it with his help. This has to do with the morning state of the unmade bed. Apparently I sleep in a bed like a letter sleeps in an envelope, which is odd, as I don't sleep either deeply or well. The painter sleeps the dreamless sleep of either the blessed or the damned, I don't know which, both are spoken of as deep, but whichever, he really messes up a bed. Here in our own house we don't mess about and bother with folding back the top sheet, just pull it straight up. A tiny rebellion. As soon the nights cool I'll get out my down comforter and sleep in heaven. Pull up, smooth, walk away.


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