Red's Wrap
Happiness. It's relative.
Flannel Sheets
We have been sleeping on flannel sheets all week. They’re orange, rust colored actually, and they’re meant for January sleeping but we are sleeping on them in July. In the long dark, the fan on the ceiling throws off balls of dust. I find them on the floor in the morning.
The nights are long and hot, the sheets like swaddling. There are shifting mounds of pillows, sleeping pillows and throw pillows. They are like pets we’ve allowed to sleep with us and they go where they are comfortable. We sleep in the space they leave for us.
Waiting for sleep, I think about changing the sheets. I could find the cool white ones that feel like vacation in an expensive hotel or the worn blue ones, made soft by decades of washing and drying and folding and smoothing. I could pull the corners tight and float on the bed like it was a pond.
But that won’t happen tonight or tomorrow. There are too many other things that have to happen. Places to go, people to tend. Changing the sheets requires the luxury of an afternoon, a day with a breeze blowing through the front windows so clean sheets can unfurl like a new flag. I don’t have that time now. Now all I can do is sleep on flannel sheets and watch the fan litter the room with its dust.
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Photo: Ray Hennessy
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Snow Door | wisconsinacademy.org
Listen to Jan read her essay “Billy” presented on WUWM’s Lake Effect
Jan’s essay “At the Breakfast Bar” on WUWM Lake Effect
Jan’s essay “The Parish Hall,” on WUWM Lake Effect
“Fury Cannot Touch Me,” Modern Love, NYT, 9/29/11
“There are shifting mounds of pillows, sleeping pillows and throw pillows. They are like pets we’ve allowed to sleep with us and they go where they are comfortable. We sleep in the space they leave for us.” These lines are pure Jan and purely wonderful. Sounds like my bed, but throw in a computer or two as well. I loved this piece. I had the sense of your being in a vacation cabin you were last in when flannel sheets were necessary. And I know so well that sense of not having a spare moment to do something you know needs to be done but sacrifice for other things..even, maybe, pure laziness. Talking about me here, not necessarily you.
One could ask how they got on the bed in the middle of July to begin with but having recently had shoulder surgery myself, I know that a lot of things just sort of happen. and at the time, it made some sense to someone, maybe even you, now it makes no sense, and fixing it seems overwhelming, so you use extra energy not fixing it. Makes perfect sense to me.
Life is about choices and sometimes we have to let the breezes blow and do nothing.