I’ve had an interesting e-mail exchange this afternoon with a friend in the Bay Area. What started out as a conversation about an orphan deer being adopted by a large dog, grew into a discussion about the joys of sleeping on a futon mattress.
After I clicked “send” on the last installment in this e-mail exchange, I realized that I’d just written my next blog entry. Here it is (with a few modifications):
I am the futon queen. I first slept on a futon when renting a furnished room in a house for the summer of 1989 in Durham, North Carolina — I’d decided to do summer school after freshman year at Duke, instead of going home. There was no frame, just the futon mattress. It was a revelation, sleeping on the floor. I also had hung a really groovy batiked bedspread on the wall at the head of the “bed,” for the full bohemian effect.
In my first apartment, in Los Angeles, my new roommate and I both bought futon beds, because they were cheap. She liked to convert hers into a couch during the day, whereas mine was a full-time bed. I loved it. But when I moved back to Virginia, I inherited an antique box spring and so went back to traditional mattresses…. Until I built my loft out of PVC pipe in 1994. At first, the guys at Lowe’s thought I was nuts, but I showed them my design for the loft and explained my choice of materials, and they were intrigued. It was pretty cool, sleeping six feet in the air, and after the cat peed on the regular mattress (summer of 1995), I replaced it with a futon mattress. As I moved around Richmond in subsequent years, one futon led to another…. I’ve not had a “traditional bed” since.
The last futon I had in Richmond was a pretty long-suffering mattress, however. I got it when Nanook was still a puppy, and he ripped into that thing a few times. It was still in great shape, but I was embarrased to change the sheets in front of anyone else, since the mattress had been repaired with duct tape. Preparing to leave Virginia, I donated it to a very grateful college student, who couldn’t have cared less about the duct tape.
When I moved to Portland a few months back, I headed downtown to Rock Soft Futon to buy my new bed. I’d already picked out what I wanted from their website: a simple wood frame (the basic model) with a queen-sized mattress with extra layers of foam and wool (the “ultra wool”), to keep it warm in winter and cool in summer. The lady in the store congratulated me on my good taste, as I’d picked out the very same configuration she had at home.
Since it’s a queen, there’s finally enough room for me once all the critters pile on (which they do, frequently). They still have a tendency to nestle rather tightly around me, to the point that I feel as though I’m squeezing myself out of a tube of toothpaste when it’s time to get up. All that room on the spacious bed, and they have to play “pile on Jen.” But I love my futon bed. Very often, I don’t want to get out of it, and think of all sorts of excuses during the day for why I should get back in it. It’s awfully tempting, with the bedroom just down the hall from my office….