Another Sleepless Night

Most people do not consider dawn to be an attractive experience - unless they are still up. ~Ellen Goodman

Another more or less sleepless night. I can’t decide if it is sub-conscious angst caused by the many details of the up-coming departure or if it is my new pillows.

Sears is having a sale! What could be more newsworthy eh?

It was Cath who spotted the sale on accessories for my mixer; they had a meat grinder and an ice cream maker listed and although I need or want neither they had a bowl with a lid and a handle that sent out those commercial come hither signals that got us both in the car and headed for the mall.

Of course the accessories that we were shopping for were no where to be found and as we toured the small appliance section we eventually found ourselves in an overlapping lane with chest high boxes that were filled with pillows.

My own pillows are probably about twenty five or more years old. They are still considered “feather pillows” I suppose but frankly they now fold over my forearm like a Butler’s serving cloth when I pick them up to put on clean pillowcases. I doubt that between the two of them that there are enough feathers left to make up one small bird. It is like a death every time I throw them in the dryer with one of those bounce sheets to “freshen” them only to find that during the process more of their life’s blood has become trapped in the lint filter. I’ve gone so far as to stand there and force the quill end back through the fabric but I do recognize the futility of this; my pillows have been living on borrowed time for years. Plain and simple: my pillows are dying and there is nothing that I can do to save them.

Anyway, back to that aisle in Sears. The sale was buy one and get the second one for a penny and who knew that there was so much technology involved in the making of a pillow? The labels made it simple enough: buy this one if you sleep on your back and that one if you sleep on your side, another if you are a stomach sleeper. Not a single brand offers the tossing and turning pillow and thus I eventually settled for the “on your face” type which felt soft enough and was said to contain less fill, making it more like my dying, soon to be featherless pillows.

The same night after I lifted my old pillows from their normal resting place between the mattress and headboard and replaced them with the “in your face pillows” that sat against the headboard looking ever so perky and inviting, I climbed into bed with drooping eyelids and too tired to read I switched out the light.

For an hour or so I flopped around like a fish periodically punching at my pillows to try and get them to conform. I was tempted to retrieve my old friends from the linen closet where I had placed them “just in case” but I knew that down the road I would have to go through this adjustment period all over again so I decided to persevere.

I seem to get to about three thirty A.M. before my usual grip starts loosening and I become increasingly unreasonable as my inner, middle aged child takes over. It was ten to four when I leaped from bed, snapped on the light and drop kicked the first pillow across the room. It hit the ceiling and bounced twice before scampering gleefully down the stairs and landing in the doorway between the family room and kitchen. As I grasped the second pillow and positioned it over my foot to send it sailing after its mate I suddenly realized what a ridiculous, immature and ineffective way this was to deal with change.

I retrieved the exiled pillow from the floor downstairs and tried not to permit the feelings of jealousy over the sonorous yips and trills coming from my sleepy babies in the dog room or of the window pane, rattling snores from Cath as I paused long enough to pour myself a cup of luke warm coffee from the carafe and head back upstairs to read until morning. One thing about my new pillows they offer significantly better back support for reading into the wee hours and maybe that’s the best that I can hope for during this transition period.