Peggy’s prompt—my childhood bed

The double bed I shared with my sister Mary was the setting for many of the important events of my childhood. The bed, with its bed-lamp positioned in the exact middle of the wall behind the bed, was where I read Gone With the Wind as fast as my eyes could fly across the pages. It’s where I would listen to my poor sister wheeze and hack her way through an asthma attack. It’s where I listened on the radio to The Great Guildersleeve and to Henry, Henry Aldrich.

The bed was the battleground for turf rights—“Mama, Mary’s getting on MY side!” when Mary would shift herself over onto my side of the bed. It’s where I tried to asset my superior familial position as eldest child by hitting her, oh so softly, to make her move back onto her side. It’s where she’d hit me back, HARD, and I’d cry out, and Daddy would call out from their adjoining bedroom “You girls better cut that out before somebody gets hurt.”

It’s where my girlfriends and I would stay up late in the rare “spend the nights” (now called sleepovers, I believe) and talk and talk, mostly in whispers. It’s where I stove off (staved off?) heat prostration in the summertime by letting ice cubes melt on my pj’s as I lay there in the Florida heat. It’s where I would sleep for hours and hours when I came home from college on vacation, making up for the sleep deprivation that seems to be synonymous with attending college.

And it’s where Mr. Lawrence, my first kitty cat, spent his entire time under the bedspread when, after Larry and I were married, we visited Mama and Daddy with him in tow. That’s a lot of memories for one bed.