At Night

Oh, oh but it is nice to be back in the bosom. I spent the afternoon puttering, reading at Raw Sugar, soaking in the tub, and the evening knitting and laughing hard and loud to the IT Crowd with Roho and Steve.

It's just so nice to be home. I like my currently very purry cat. I like my stuff. I like my bedroom, I like my bed.

It's a queen sized futon. It's a few years old now, but I rotate it pretty regularly, so the wear has been even. It's firm but not hard. My room is pretty bright from the street lamp outside, but it is devoid of blinking digital technology.

If you're used to that, sleeping at my mom's is a little rough.

Either you're in the office:
- which she doesn't use since she started with the laptop in the kitchen - a room with about 4 sqaure feet not taken up by the giant desk that used to be my father's, the twin bed that used to be my Aunt Dorothy's, the bookcase and beside table from our old old house. There's a TV in there too. And a computer.

The mattress is decades old, kind of lumpy, and slides around on the box spring. The only sheets the has for it are 15 years old - the sheets I used that misguided year spent in residence. They're too small for the mattress, and the elastic is shot. You spend most of the night tossing and turning and trying to flatten out a bottom sheet that won't stay flattenend, and then getting up and moving the mattress back on to the box spring after your turning has shifted it precariously over.

That's after I've draped my clothing over the flickering red and green of the modem, the wireless router, and the digital clock.

Or you're in the storage room:
of course. That involves setting up the air mattress, which takes up all but 12 inches of the available space left in the room - literally, 6 inches on each side of the bed, with 12 inches at the bottom.

You are ringed by her looming storage shelves: four 2x3 industrial plastic 7 foot tall shelves full of bulk cereal and household cleansers bought at costco, at least 35 years worth of yarn in totes, enough wrapping paper to make a present of god, and rows and rows and rows of books that have not been, and will never be, read.

You cannot get the air mattress full enough so that the middle is firm. While the office bed will pitch you over to one side or the other, the air mattress rolls you inevitably back into its suffocating central valley. Sure, you might stick out an arm, drape a leg over one of the side ridges; but you won't be comfortable.

A good night's sleep is on the next map over.