The Po Show

Ample Make This Bed

Ample make this bed
Make this bed with awe...

I can't remember the rest, but it's a lovely poem by Emily Dickenson, which I remember because it's read at the end of Sophie's Choice by the William Styron character.

But this is about beds, new and old. Ross and I have a new bed, a lovely plush pillowtop bed purchased during the last weekend (lots of Columbus Day sales! Thanks Columbus for making our bed cheaper!). We've been talking about getting a new bed for a long time, as the old one was 11 years old and pretty shot. It had been from Costco and was not of the greatest quality to begin with, and it's seen a lot of use (is innuendo being implied here? You be the judge!).

So I put the old bed up for offer on freecycle (ah, feeling so very civic virtuous, keeping down that old landfill). A woman named Sandra just came and picked it up. She was accompanied by her teenage daughter and an older man with a beat up old pickup truck that already had a sofa and a bookcase in it. Looking at the two women, it seemed likely that they were moving out of a shelter and thus needed the furniture. She was really grateful and I felt both humbled and very very glad that I had put the bed up on freecycle. The place we purchased our new bed from had wanted $30 apiece to haul away our old mattress and box spring to the dump, and I am so happy that instead it went to someone that really NEEDED it to sleep on!

I felt wistful as it was being loaded up onto the truck though. People spend a lot of time in bed, if they're lucky, and 11 years is a long time. It was the first bed we had when we moved out of our single apartment in Westwood and into our first one bedroom in L.A. Ross was in his first year of grad school at UCLA and I was working the first year in my job. We were trying to have a baby.

Matthew never was conceived in that bed (instead he was conceived when Ross' washed sperm was inserted into me via a catheter at the Kaiser in Panorama City, while Ross waited in the waiting room). Tessa was, though, I think. I took a lot of naps on that bed before we had kids. I have no idea how many time Ross and I had sex on that bed, but it was probably well over a thousand.

I snuggled my babies on that bed when they were days old. Tessa was still crawling into that bed with us every single night up to last Thursday. That bed traveled with us, from L.A. to Davis (where it went into Tessa's room, since Ross and I slept on the bed the owners of our house had left while they were away for the year, which I still find sort of weird) to Belmont Massachussetts to White Plains New York. Now it travels again, without us.

Yes, it was amply made, indeed.