When I was a child, I loved the story of the Princess and the Pea\u2014the one about the young woman who was so sensitive that she could detect even something so small as a single pea hidden in her towering stack of mattresses.\u00a0 And when Carol Burnett\u2019s musical version of that folk tale\u2014Once Upon a Mattress–showed up on television in the sixties, I loved that, too.<\/p>\n
The movie may have been televised in color in other parts of the country, but what made it over the Mule Mountains and down the canyons to our home in Bisbee was definitely black and white only.\u00a0 Even so, when Princess Winnifred arrives in a most unorthodox fashion, her future mother-in-law’s disapproval was on full display when she announced, \u201cShe swam the moat!\u201d<\/p>\n
Although I loved the story and the movie, I never expected that I, myself, was destined to become a late-in-life version of Princess Winnifred\u2014a pillow style version rather than a mattress one.<\/p>\n
I can\u2019t sleep on pillows that are filled with what I suspect to be something similar to astro-turf.\u00a0 I need feathers.\u00a0 I need something soft.\u00a0 Anything else makes my ears ache\u2014not the insides of my ears\u2014the outsides.\u00a0 They hurt.\u00a0 They wake me up.\u00a0 So that\u2019s one issue. Initially I watched those My Pillow commercials with some curiosity, but once I learned that what\u2019s inside them has nothing to do with feathers, I\u2019m not buying one, even if I can get a second one free by simply paying for shipping and handling.<\/p>\n
Years ago, when Bill and I first married, I had the coldest feet in the world\u2014summer and winter.\u00a0 Then I reached a certain age.\u00a0 My feet warmed up and so did everything else.\u00a0 Over night, covers went on covers came off.\u00a0 By morning, I would be wrapped up like a burrito and Bill would be \u2026 well \u2026 let\u2019s not go there. The solution to the cover dilemma and one which preserved our marital harmony was having twin duvets on our bed.\u00a0 Bill has his covers, I have mine, and never the twain shall meet.\u00a0 But my feet, which were once perpetually cold, are now perpetually warm.\u00a0 We keep a fan running in our bedroom\u2014summer and winter.\u00a0 All I have to do to keep my feet cool is to stick them out into the open at the far end of my private duvet.<\/p>\n
But now I\u2019m dealing with the problem of cooling off the other end.\u00a0 The term \u201chot head\u201d comes to mind.\u00a0 If I wake up overnight, ears hurting or not, in order to fall back asleep, I need to have a cool pillow readily at hand.\u00a0 With the fan running, any pillow not actively in use is, by definition, a cool pillow. And so I keep my side of the bed stocked with a random supply of down pillows\u2014big ones, little ones, fluffy ones, not so fluffy ones.\u00a0 I maybe don\u2019t have quite as many pillows as Princess Winnifred had mattresses, but close. When it\u2019s time for me to go back to sleep, I make a selection from my vast supply of pre-cooled pillows, and magically it\u2019s night-night time.<\/p>\n
My mother, who slept with one pillow only, would be appalled at such wastefulness, but you know what?\u00a0 I have it on good authority that writers are allowed to be eccentric.\u00a0 They\u2019re ENCOURAGED to be eccentric.\u00a0 If having my side of the bed buried under a collection of pillows is as bad as it gets, so be it.<\/p>\n
You could say that Princess Winnifred and J.A. Jance are two peas in a pod, as it were.<\/p>\n
Believe me, it could be a whole lot worse.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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