Published: March 23, 2008 10:45 pm            

To sleep or not to sleep

I guess some people like to sleep in their old room when they visit their parents, if their parents haven’t turned it into a den or a sewing room.

Although they have redecorated it, brutally removed my purple shag carpet in favor of some boring plush taupe, it is still a bedroom.

The sleeping arrangements at my parents’ house are complex.

Mom and Dad have a wonderful king-sized bed in their room. However, they both snore and can’t stand to hear the other one snore, so my mother has taken over my old room. Every trip I make there, I sleep on the living room couch.

Of course a lack of a bed isn’t the only problem with catching a few Zs at their house. Because they are elderly and have poor circulation, they are always cold. So the temperature in the house is always a balmy 80 degrees. Nice if you’re wearing a swimsuit and sipping a pina colada, but you can’t get away with that in their living room.

My old room was created from attic space. A bathroom and a bedroom are all that exists upstairs and it was all mine. Now it is mother’s.

The only problem with my mom sleeping upstairs is her mobility. While she is being treated for problems with her hips, her condition hasn’t improved yet. Every night, she gingerly creeps up the stairs for bed. Every night, Dad watches her and worries that she’ll fall.

To solve this problem, Mom called her favorite furniture store and ordered a day bed that she swore she’d sleep on downstairs in the den.

Dad said she slept on it one night and never again, and she never explained why.

“Money well spent,” he said sarcastically.

On my last visit there, Mom told me what a nice day bed I would have to sleep in. She was enthusiastic enough to make me suspicious.

The first night there, I tried to sleep on the day bed, but the house was like a tropical rainforest and the day bed is in the “warm” part of the house. I retreated to the living room, where is it usually too cold for them to sit.

“How did you sleep?” Dad asked. He’s always surprised when I tell him I didn’t.

When I told him I laid in my own sweat all night, he admitted he forgot to turn the heat back before he went to bed.

Now this has nothing to do with their beds, but why would a person turn the heat back at night? Doesn’t it get colder at night? Don’t we lie still, making it more difficult to stay warm?

Anywho, the next night, it was a bit cooler and I decided to do my best to sleep on the day bed.

This is when I learned why my mom insists on climbing the stairs every night.

The day bed looks solid and smooth, but there is a definite sensation of the mattress tilting away from the headboard, which by the way, on a day bed, rests alongside one side of your body, making it impossible to let your arms dangle off the side. This is a problem when you have arms like a gorilla. They need more room than a day bed allows.

I know I drifted off to sleep around 2, but woke up at 3, not because I was sweating but because I thought I was rolling off the bed into the floor. If I had had a dream, it would have been about being spit out by a great white whale.

This is when I noticed the fitted sheet was wrapped around my feet, not because my feet had gotten cold and sought heat, oh no. The fitted sheet was meant for a full-sized bed, not a day bed. In fact, none of the linens fit the bed.

I spent the rest of the night lying there, listening to the wall clock tick, looking forward to the next night when I would be back in my own full-sized bed with properly sized linens in a comfortably cool house.

It also inspired an idea for my next gift to them: linens for a half bed.

LEE WARD can be reached at lward@dailyindependent.com or (606) 326-2661.

        

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