The Making of the bed

Here we are in a time when beds are made out of 'space age' materials and when one lays on such a mattress, one is certain heaven has happened. It is also an era where one can have a mattress made for you or have controls so each of you have just what you want for your own sleeping comfort verses your bed buddy.

Think back to what it must have been like to sleep on a straw filled mattress. Keeping in mind of course, that those ancestors didn't have anything to compare it to. For those of you who have climbed up a straw stack and laid on your back to watch the clouds, it seems like it would be comfortable. But straw breaks down and begins to stick through the ticking.

How nice, these folks must have thought, to gather enough feathers to make a feather bed. How grand it would be, a wife might think, if her husband shot enough water fowl to actually make a mattress. If enough, then maybe even a cover!

The Johnson family were hunters. The birds were cleaned by their mother and she, indeed, kept the feathers, not for mattresses, but for pillows. We have one of those pillows and it is huge! It is a mix of down and feathers.

What is the difference? Feathers can poke through, down are the feathers from the breast. A guessed-a-mit for a standard pillow is about 25. Now, you need to think about this. All water fowl have lice, so you want those little critters to crawl out or die off, then! You make the pillows. Sweet Thomas says if we really want to know what all different kinds of feathers there are in that pillow, we can open it out and see. Erna recovered them as the need arose.

We had mattresses and box springs when I grew up and pillows that were made from rubber. Daddy didn't like them because they twisted up his hair. The parents rubber pillows were replaced with new age filler and the rubber pillows were put on my bed. Twisted my hair too.

As a young family we had those Dacron pillows.

When I moved to Fargo, I had my first encounter with a down pillow. Such an affair started with it that when we went to Canada on a holiday, we went to Hudson Bay and bought down pillows to sleep on while away from our own bed.

Thinking North Dakota was going to be cold, we brought a down comforter. In Minnesota, there is no tax on clothing, I tried to convince the clerk it was to be a wrap, she still taxed us for it.

Well, feathers on the top, feathers under our heads.....let's push a little more and put feathers underneath! That was a little more ducky down than needed and the feather mattress flew to the lake and is just under the sheet. It takes the edge off the hardness of the bed--BUT it packs, so the loft of the feathers is gone after the first sleep.

Down pillows can be shook to bring back the loft but who is going to remake an entire bed every day?

The down comfortable was given away, it really isn't THAT cold in North Dakota. WE DO HAVE HEAT IN THE HOUSE. We have heavy winter, light winter, light summer blankets in the closet. So what do we use? A flannel blanket over the sheet. And pillows? Ten pillows on the bed. Making the bed has become an art form.

Time me: Three minutes!

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