Long live the queen?

I graduated from college to a queen-size mattress nearly 40 years ago. Sometimes I wonder how much landscape that really means I gained.

The earliest bed I know I slept in was a baby bed that Mother used to tell me Daddy had "cut down" to make what she called a "junior bed" for me—some arrangement, I'm sure, that used the mattress and maybe whatever base the baby bed had had.

The reason I know about that bed is the story she used to tell of having had a houseful of people one night when it occurred to her to wonder where I was. A quick look around the living areas suggested I had either wandered into a bedroom and just wasn't answering when she called me or I had wandered somewhere outside, which at that time was a pretty broad expanse of not much of anything.

She found me, she used to say, bent over at the waist on my bed, sound asleep with my feet on the floor. Never let it be said I'm new at sleeping like a rock.

The first bed I really remember is the double bed I shared with my sister Margaret Joan in the large front bedroom of our home that was probably supposed to have been the "main" if not the "master" bedroom. Logic put me and MJ in there in a double bed with sister Susan Rene's bed pushed up against one wall of the room and ours paralleling, not unlike the dormitory at the orphanage. I remember making the bed every morning and lining up an assortment of dolls and stuffed animals with their heads on our feather pillows, and I remember arranging my shoes squarely beside the bed when we crawled in to sleep at night.

Our brothers shared a room across the hall that I mostly remember featuring Beau's twin bed and Joe Duck's baby bed. I assume JD moved out of the baby bed before Mother and Daddy remodeled when he was somewhere between 3 and 5, but I really don't recall. My place was across the hall.

My memories of the double bed are faded, too, except for the night SR threw up in my shoes. I remember that it seemed that SR was sick a lot during her high school years, possibly, I suppose, related to the problems with her appendix that eventually led to an appendectomy in our family. The nausea came on her suddenly, and I remember Mother patiently following behind with a mop and pail; I wonder now if she was grateful then for the linoleum tile floors we had in the days when carpet of any kind was a luxury we couldn't afford.

The night I recalled was another one of those times when SR woke up just enough to lean over the side of her bed and toss her cookies before she woke MJ enough to tell her she was sick. MJ is our saint in training, and she elected to try to help SR feel better while I went to get help. One look at my shoes was all it took for me: I had visions of slogging off to school the next morning with vomit still in my shoes.

I was old enough to go wake up Mother and Daddy, and when I wailed my way into their room, they were both up and out in seconds, Mother to take care of SR and weild the mop and Daddy to set up shop in the bathroom to calm me down and clean up my shoe. Most of my shoes except for my Sunday patents were pretty much washable, and by morning mine were clean and dry and fine to wear to school. That memory of sitting in the bathroom with Daddy cleaning my shoe and comforting me is still one of my strongest images of him.

Mother and Daddy added bedrooms to the house before SR went off to college, and I eventually got "promoted" into her small bedroom and twin bed after she was gone. I was fine with a twin bed—bigger than my half of a double and small enough not to take up much space in my room.

I got the queen when I got my first job after college because by then I was engaged and my guy and I had decided a queen would be large enough to be comfortable but small enough not to be wall-to-wall bed in our apartment. I don't recall at all where I slept on the bed while I was still single, but I think I sort of took my half out of the middle.

When we married, we had a bit of a discussion over who got which side of the bed, and I think it eventually came down to "my" side being the one closer to the bathroom in our first apartment so that I could get up and slip out of the house before the husband had to get up. I don't recall ever feeling as if my "side" of the bed was my "half" of the bed, but I didn't think much of that because I am physically smaller than the other occupant, and he seemed to move around in his sleep more than I did.

I didn't pay much attention to that until Number One Son came along and reached the age where he would slip downstairs from his room and slip into bed next to me. He never made much noise; he just quietly crawled in next to me, and if he moved again before morning, I seldom knew it. I remember waking up to think it was pretty amazing that he didn't fall off the bed because of the few inches he had available.

I became more aware of it when Soldier Son reached that age. Instead of settling for the ribbon of space between me and the edge of the bed, he'd crawl over me and proceed to flail his arms and legs enough that his dad banished him from the bed. We resolved that by putting a pallet on the floor near enough to me that he could feel comfortable, and all of us slept better for it.

When the spousal unit moved out, I inched a little nearer the center of the bed, but the alarm clock on the nightstand sort of limited my place to an arm's length from the snooze button. Before long, the unused side of the bed became piled with an assortment of paperwork as I burrowed into my room to work so the kids could have the open area for their entertainment; as long as the sounds from there were happy sounds and nobody was getting hurt, I was fine letting them have their space, and it sort of didn't occur to me that I was giving up mine.

Darling Daughter eventually observed that possibly working in my sleep space might not be an optimal lifestyle, so I reorganized my life enough to have the whole bed for sleeping, restricted only by the distance to the snooze button.

With the papers gone, all three cats and the dog started sleeping with me. Typically, I had a cat snuggled into my tummy, one parked behind my knees, and one nestled on my feet. The dog had plenty of room on the far side of the bed.

Gradually, all of those animals died off, and I replaced them with one new cat and a dog. At first, the cat liked to sleep with me, but the dog is clearly an Alpha Bitch, and she soon outlawed that.  AB typically sleeps at the foot of the bed, near where the previous dog slept, but she never relieves herself of guard duty; not only does she alert me to anything moving in or near the house, but she protects the bed from the cat and snaps at me if I move my feet. But for the last couple of nights, I've had one or another of the carry-on bags I'm packing for an upcoming trip to Los Angeles parked more or less in her spot, so she's had to move.

Last night, she snuggled right up next to me on the pillows. For some reason, I had a restless night (not anything, as far as I can tell, to do with the AB), so I found my self arranging and rearranging the pillows and bedding.

And wondering how it is that I sleep alone on a queen-size bed and still manage to wind up two inches from the edge.