House Series # 11, The Bedroom: A Place to Lay My Head

            When I was a child, my bed was in a corner, head to head with my sister’s bed along the other wall. I struggled to make it up every morning, and I vowed that when I grew up, I would have a bed that was easy to make up.

            For forty years I had a bedroom loft, with a short strip of floor to kneel on before getting onto the foam mattress on the loft floor that served as a bed. It was ridiculously difficult to make up. I had to kneel or lie on the mattress to pull the sheets off. When I half-stood, my head might hit the roof beam; I had to lie on the bed to tuck under the sheets; I couldn’t shake out blankets but could only pull them into place.

            Now at last, in my new house, I have an easy-to make bed, one of my own design: a platform on top of four two-drawer chests from my old house (see couch behind the ladder in picture above). The bed sits under the west window so that I’m looking east. There is a large window to the south and another window on the east wall.

The morning sun tops the mountain, then slides westward without ever waking me with the blare of sunlighrt. The full moon shines brightly but not too long before it dips behind the trees to the west. The stars glitter when the moon is new. I watch the three bright stars of Orion’s belt rise over Humpy in a slightly different place, each night. Last week a young moon hung just over the top of Humpy.

 The closet has louvered doors with accordion hinges and a manzanita-branch pull. When I told Richard I wanted something made from manzanita, he said he would make it if I would find the manzanita limb: straight, no knots or limbs, consistent circumference. In a manzanita! I hunted through the woods with my bow saw for a long time but finally cut some dark red limbs that suited Richard’s specs. When the closet doors are closed, the pieces of manzanita look like one branch.     

            Besides the bed, the only other pieces of furniture are a chest of drawers that came from my parents’ bedroom in the house I grew up in and a chair from that same house. The photographs on the wall were done by my Ph.D. advisor, who gave them to me at graduation. I used some graduation gift money to have them framed.

            When the house was finished and I had moved in, I was displeased with only one thing. The light switch in the bedroom was on the wall at the top of the stairs, not where I could reach it from the bed. That meant I had to walk around the bed to turn on the reading lamp and walk around again to turn off the ceiling light before getting into bed. Then one night, I thought, “What’s wrong with getting into bed in the dark?” Ever since then, I have enjoyed a few moments every night to look at the dark mountain silhouetted against a moonlit, starlit, or cloud-darkened sky.
          And in the morning, when I get up, I can easily access all sides of the bed for making it up.