The Adult Bed
He said our bed was giving him an anxiety attack.
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T. announced Saturday morning that he was putting his foot down and we were going into “adult bed” mode. My first impulse was to panic. Did this mean Ruthie wasn’t allowed to sleep in the bed anymore? Did it mean no more phones or computers? No coffee or toast? I was particularly worried that he wanted to banish Ruthie. I love sleeping with Ruthie. I love eating toast in bed with Ruthie while drinking coffee. Would this end?
But no. Ruthie was safe, coffee and toast too. Adult bed was about aesthetics, not pets or snacks. “Adult bed” just meant no more aggressively mismatched sheets, pillowcases and comforter covers. The bed didn’t have to have hotel-quality linen matching, like where every single element is the exact same fabric and color. “I just don’t want it to be a complete mishmash,” T. said. “Right now we have a pink paisley sheet from Pottery Barn Kids and then we have another Pottery Barn Kids thing, a quilt with vintage airplanes on it, primary colors – and the pillowcases are earth-toned, red and tan, with dusty blue flowers!” He said our bed was giving him an anxiety attack.
It was not giving me an anxiety attack at all. I will have you know I have always assembled our allegedly non-adult bed with a lot of care. I change the sheets often, and seek out good quality bedding, new and used. I got that Pottery Barn Kids semi-vintage airplane quilt for $15 at the Salvation Army in Chico while Ruthie was being spayed. I love that quilt. It was a real find. And those flowered pillowcases are the best cotton! They’re from L.L. Bean, which is weird. I got the whole set for $12 at a second hand shop in Carlsbad, the fitted sheet is No Longer With Us but the rest of it lives on. I care more about fabric quality than how things look, in fact, I like a patchwork aesthetic. But I don’t have a strong preference for it. I also like simplicity and can be classy when I feel like it. If T. thought a more uniform bedding scheme would improve his frame of mind I was willing to support him. I have known for some time that non-matching pillowcases bother him the way loud sounds bother me. People don’t choose what upsets them.
So we threw out some bedding. We kept the quilt and the pillowcases, but that paisley sheet, frankly not the most high-quality cotton, as it is newish and Pottery Barn Kids is sadly past its prime, we got rid of. We threw out our yellowest grossest pillows and sent redundant blankets, sheets and lone wolf pillowcases to the thrift store. We used to have a cedar linens trunk with too much crap in it. Now it all fits.
It was now time to assemble the adult bed. Our best mattress pad has had one broken elastic for years. T. mended it with the sewing machine and put it on as the first layer. We added an off-white fitted sheet that is so nice neither of us has any idea where we got it. No top sheet, because T. is not quite in the top sheet generation. The comforter cover, white, with a green border, is from some “HOTEL COLLECTION” and I got it at a thrift store two years ago for $5. Oh, it was exciting, one of the greatest moments of my life, it’s a hell of an object. We topped this off with four reasonably healthy pillows: two in relatively similar white pillowcases, two exactly matching ones in tan.
I fell asleep smiling at all the matching stuff. I woke up to the sound of rain, only the second rain in many, many months, much desired, and told myself, as I fell back asleep, that I had somehow brought on this thrilling weather, just by getting a tiny bit organized.