My Bed

Originally my husband and I slept together on a kingsize mattress that was so thick and thus high off the ground that we, like my daughter and her husband, who had introduced us to this giant called it "Mount Bed."  As you can imagine it was something to get into the thing, running jump, and all that.  Waking up and stepping out groggily for a pee in the middle of the night was no casual affair.  Times went by, hubby retired and preferred to read into the wee hours, I thus abandoned ship, or bed, rather.  Well, we ended up entirely happily in two separate rooms decorated to our own devising.  He is in a giant bed covered in one of those quilted coverlets that Germans use in lieu of top sheet and blanket; we bought it for him last year in Wiesbaden and it was costly.  But, my god, that was what he wanted more than anything.  Every time we had gone traveling in Germany he luxuriated in it, whereas I cannot stand so much heat retaining fabric upon me in anything but truly cold weather.  But he is more like a mole, his room darkened day and night like an underground tunnel.  The bedding suits, and he has it arranged together with six pillows elegantly stacked up behind his head.  Several years ago I gave Mount Bed away to our trainer who is a handsome young sexual athlete who needs an attractive playing field.  In exchange I got myself a chaste single bed that is lower to the ground, easy to slip in and out of. At the end I have folded an elegant old car rug from the 1920's which a dear old friend of mine had saved from the days of her father's opulent chauffeur driven days.  At the other end fronting the two pillows upon which I rest my head I have set two pillows retrieved from the furnishing we bought along with the second condo next door.  They belonged, as the expression always goes, to a "little old lady."  I never met her but her insistent kitsch instantly endeared her to me, I mean a small glass bowl with plastic poinsettia--you can't get better than that.  We imported that into our living room, along with a number of home made occasional pillows that are hand made and trimmed in lace, but without question the true delight are the two pillows that I took to front my night pillows.  These are square, white, edged in white lace, covered with little blue shining dots in patterns, loose and light, and interspersed here and there in seriously, thought out design relationships are pink silk hearts laboriously cut out and appliqued onto the fabric of the pillow covering.  I am not about to analyze this element of bedroom design.  My second wife instructed me in Bauhaus, Minimalism, clean surfaces, the emptying out of all sentimentality, ideas to which I eagerly subscribed after growing up in fifties Eisenhower Iowa.  And that is the aesthetic with which my husband and I have lived in our public rooms.  I have often teased him for his love of kitsch, acquired perhaps from his time spent in Berlin in the early sixties.  He yearns to cover surfaces in his room with a scarf or other decorated cloth upon which he puts at sensitive distances photographs on stands or a vase or small statue.  My room screams "Spare, spare, spare."  (although if he were writing this he would inevitably say "Messy, messy, messy."  Into this minimal space I have my two pillows from the old lady and my limousine rug.  Just the touch it needed.  I could not be happier.