A story

Since last summer, Tony and I have been sleeping on our queen sized bed from Ikea. We didn't have very much money when we purchased it, so we bought the queen sized box spring and the cheapest mattress they had to go with it. The mattress was about an inch thick and much too hard. We solved the problem temporarily by placed on top of the Ikea queen sized box spring and itty bitty mattress a foam rubber king sized "mattress" which usually is crinkled up in a big fluffy lounge chair. I bought the lounge chair at a place in the Mall of America, and found out that if you unzipped it, you would have a huge mattress which was full of chunks of foam rubber. Once you unfurled the "mattress" and jumped up and down on it, squishing it around with your feet and rolling around on it, you could have a pretty comfortable place for a guest to spend the night on the floor. We put it on top of our Ikea bed.

Long story short, I will simply say that once you put a sheet on it and got into bed, the "mattress" would assume the first position both of us started out in. Usually, by the end of the first night after "fluffing" it, there would be a Tony-sized dip on one side and a Liza-sized dip on the other side, separated by a large lump that neither of us could manage to traverse during the night in order to cuddle with the other. Plus, the foam rubber peices would get compacted down and usually on the other side of either dip there would be a downward slope to the floor.

For the past many months, we have been trying to find a real mattress. Since summer started, we have made it a habit to go to rummage sales and drive past slowly, looking for a suitable replacement for our foam-rubber sleeping hell. Alas, it was all to no avail.

UNTIL yesterday.


Yesterday I went to a rummage sale. Quite by accident - I was on a road I don't drive on much and followed some signs that might or might not have been recent... and I made a split second decision to turn right instead of left once I found the street written on the sign - and I found the sale. But I saw no mattresses, and was very disappointed. I decided I would go home, and try again another day.

I was going to leave the garage where the sale was taking place when I turned back after I decided last-minute to purchase a pull apart shelf for $1.00. While I was pulling my dollar in quarters out of my purse, I heard the woman in the garage say to her friend "oh, and can I have you help me bring up a mattress from the basement?"

She wanted $20 for it. I bought it before she even got it up from the basement.

I was so happy I could have cried.

And so we brought it home and put it on top of our Ikea bed. And I lysoled it and frebreezed it and put a plastic allergy cover on it and a big thick mattress pad. And pretty sheets.

It felt quite like we were sleeping in a hotel. A nice hotel. With a real bed.

And our lives are quite a bit better than they used to be.

That's my story.