When I was a kid, I had a number of chores my mother expected me to do every day. One of them was making up my bed, and I really came to hate that particular chore.
Making up my bed every day made about as much sense as teaching poetry to a possum. Why do I need to make up my bed when I’m only going to get back into it in a few hours? My mother wasn’t inviting her friends back to my bedroom to admire my bed-making skills.
Sometimes, in a concerted effort to just get the job done, I’d quickly pull the sheets up to the top of the mattress, then quickly pull the bedspread up. The results were, well, a bit lumpy. And they never met my stickler mother’s approval.
“Mitch, get back in here and make this bed up the right way,” she’d said, using in a loud voice. Not because she was necessarily mad, but because after my pitiful efforts to make up my bed, I’d made tracks out of the house and into the yard to play.
I’d come back in and smooth the sheets flat, then pull and straighten the bedspread just so. There, I thought. It’s done. Bring your friends over and show it off because this is the best it’s going to get.
Of course, when I went off to college, I became a rebel. I never made my bed. In fact, I’m not sure I washed my sheet more than dozen times in four years, but that’s another story.
As an adult, I do things a little differently. I still don’t completely make the bed every morning. But I do pull and straighten the sheets and the bedspread. Then I lay the pillows in place. Grudgingly, I admit it makes the room look neater, and I do like getting into a somewhat made bed.
The story of my battles with my mother over making up the bed brings me to a story of my bed another female in my life. Milly, the liver and white springer spaniel who lives at my house, sleeps in my bed, usually right up next to me.
Milly is now almost 4 years old. Until just recently, every time I left the house, I put in her in a crate in my bedroom. I did this because Doc, Milly’s personal veterinarian, told me crate training was great for dogs and because, until just recently, Milly was more destructive than a Category 5 hurricane.
She once reduced a napkin to a million tiny strips of paper in the time it took me to walk from the living room to the kitchen to get a glass of tea.
But her destructive ways eased as she matured, and I hated to put her in the crate. So I decided to test her. I left her closed up in my bedroom while I was at work. She aced the test – for a while.
Now when I come home, my bed is completely unmade. Milly pulls the bedspread about halfway down the bed, piling it up so she can nuzzle in next to it. Or she moves the pillows to create a fort she can hide in.
The worse part of it is she seems so proud of herself.
But I’m thankful for small things. At least I haven’t come home to find the stuffing in my pillows scattered around the room.
