Greetings From Justinland
There's No Place Like Home archives sign SEND YOUR LOVE INTO THE FUTURE I Link, therefore I am Your Love Boat Crew Take a Walk in Our Garden 100 things clix Goatboi Gallery Tell Dr JJ all about it
1-26-2003 - 12:06 p.m.

The Big Feather Bed

Hawk has wanted a feather bed for as long as I have known him. I think it must be nostalgia for all those cold wintery nights he spent growing up on the South Dakota prairie. I have had to veto any down related bedding products, because I am allergic to feathers.

Ahhh-chooo

We have gotten along fine and stayed warm all these years with foam rubber pillows and cotton filled quilts made by Grandma Hawk. We have transferred all of our down motivated gay snobbery into an insistence for Egyptian cotton linens or flannel with a moose theme. Even without feathers, me and the Hawk (and sometimes Mikey) have been sleeping stylish in a king-sized log bed.

One day recently I am watching QVC. (I had time off from school, OK?) The theme of the hour is the Northern Nights bedding collection. I should never watch QVC because I am sooooo vulnerable to their sales pitches. Info-mercials, too. I was sure that Bow-Flex was going to give me rock hard abs and change my life. We use it as a clothes rack.

The Northern Nights bedding looks really warm and comfy. The sales lady is hitting on a favorite Feng Shui theme of mine; that your bed is sacred space, your sanctuary and that you must honor that space. Then she moves in for the kill. The down is cleaned a zillion times and is hypoallergenic. There�s a little video clip of the feathers being fluffed and vacuumed. She shows me a handful of feathers and they are just as pure and white as clouds on a July Morning. She shows a canister of the muck that the good people at Northern Nights remove from their feathers. Guaranteed not to trigger your allergies

By now I have the cell phone in one hand and the credit card in the other. But wait, THERE�S MORE!

Isn�t there always? 4 down pillows! A 3 inch down filled mattress pad! It�s like sleeping on a cloud�and I can divide the cost into 3 EZ-Payments

SOLD!

7-10 days later the UPS man delivers a box to the house the size of a Buick. It�s so heavy we can hardly get it off the front porch. �It�s a feather bed� I tell curious Dr Hawk. He expresses concern for my allergies.

When the box is slit open, the contents begin to expand, sort of like putting marshmallow Easter Peeps in the microwave oven. What? You have never done that? The pillows don�t present a problem and the mattress pad turns out to be cushy and fun, but the down comforter is basically just a giant bag of feathers. It�s like a fluffy iceberg, sitting in the middle of our bed. I thought it would have some kind of quilting in it to keep the feathers from shifting around, but they all bunch up in the bottom. The cats and Maria think it�s great fun to dive it and roll around.

We finally get the thing flattened out and the feathers evenly distributed. Our bed is now 18 inches higher than it used to be and it feels like you are climbing into quicksand. Hawk declared that he �loves it� and at this point I feel it�s safe to drop the other shoe and mention that I have also ordered a $315 Ralph Lauren duvet cover.

Later that night, we take the thing for a �test drive� if you know what I mean. Nudge, wink. It�s so soft, you can�t get any traction, if you know what I mean , but we do laugh a lot. The feather shift and bunch until our bed looks like a postcard from a Rocky Mountain ski slope.

I wake up around 3am, freezing. I am covered in nothing but a thin layer of empty cotton. Hawk has completely disappeared in a 3 foot avalanche of feathers. I have to beat the feathers back to even find him

But I am not sneezing.



Go Back
Previously in Justinland: Our Last Five Entries

Wagons Ho! - 4-23-2004

This Old Barn - 4-17-2004

Death and Taxes - 4-15-2004

MMQB:Leftover Peeps - 4-12-2004

The Alamo; The Movie not the Shrine - 4-10-2004


pot luck? Take a chance

comments
hosted by DiaryLand.com