Sweet dreams are made of this

Okay. Long story short: My parents have some friends named Don and Betty who are downsizing their house and have bought a cute place in Alabama with a master bedroom too small to accommodate their king-sized bed they had at their house in New Castle.

Accordingly, Betty, a jewel among women, asked my mother if she knew of anyone who'd like to have a really nice king-sized mattress, two twin-sized box springs and an oak headboard. My mother, always one to think of family first, said, "Oh, Shelley and the Prince of Salesmen would love to have it!" Which was true. We do have a very nice mattress and box springs, queen-sized, which we bought with our tax check ten years or so ago, but who would be goofy enough to pass up a free king-sized mattress, box springs and headboard? Especially ones that belonged to Don and Betty, who have an income bracket that is, oh, I don't know, several hundred thousand dollars a year higher than ours? So they buy nicer stuff? I'm just saying.

So this morning has been spent with making preparations to move our queen-sized bed to Aisling's room where she will have a queen-sized bed upon which to store 7,000 Build-a-Bear Workshop plush animals, all of whom wear clothes nicer than mine, and a twin bed, upon which she will rest her weary bones, all tired from unloading the dishwasher and doing algebra and dusting. She has also just asked me to add that she exercises a lot, which accounts for some of her fatigue.

And also moving the king sized bed and its accoutrements from New Castle to our city, using two minivans with all the seats taken out. Which is so easy to type, but so awful to actually experience, with all the lifting and heaving and sweating, not to mention the sweeping up of dust bunnies under my bed, which made me just want to die of shame when my mother came upstairs and saw. Inexplicably, I found a volume of the poetry of Byron, Shelley and Keats under the bed. Why?

Thankfully, my mother, who used to make me and my brother clean out the cracks between the boards of the hardwood floors with toothpicks when we were children, admitted to some dust bunnies of her own when her bed was last moved. Somewhere in heaven, our mutual grandma, Hazel Williams Houser, may be sitting on a speckless cloud right now, rigid with shock and determining to step up her prayers on our behalf.

Anyway, the king-sized mattress is in the upstairs hallway and the two twin-sized box springs are in my living room and the king-sized headboard is precariously leaning up against the wall in the foyer. My husband is disassembling the gorgeous wrought-iron headboard and footboard from the frame of our queen-sized bed; the queen-sized mattress and box springs are leaning up against the wall.

My dresser, armchair and ottoman in my bedroom still have to be moved in order to make room for the king-sized bed frame, which is also in our room. We also have two king-sized egg-crate mattress toppers rolled up and propped in the corner of our room like two giant burritos.

The four seats of our minivan are in the dining room, the first Station of the Cross got knocked off the wall in the foyer and the gorgeous Bouguereau print of the Madonna and infant Jesus my friend Lori gave us was safely removed to the kitchen table, along with the 30 inch statue of St. Thérèse, which usually sits on the piano.

"Tell me," I said bleakly to the statue, "do you think we'll have this sorted out by Christmas?"

In short, the house is in chaos and the mess is nothing short of overwhelming. I have dust in my hair and grit on my lips and I can hardly wait to take a shower tonight and go climb into my NEW KING-SIZED BED.

Thank you, dear, sweet, generous Don and Betty!