A Tale of Two Beds

What does it mean to live a semi-nomadic existence, what I like to call (perhaps because I am a ridiculous idealist/romantic) the “travel life”? Well, for the most part, it means discovering afresh how to accomplish all the ordinary life things that you need to do. For us, this weekend, that means buying a bed. Which is more of a challenge than you might think here in Maine’s largest city.

Until now, we’ve had only a bed frame, and we’ve been quite happy not to lug a huge head- and foot-board around the country, so there. But now we live in this superb apartment – truly, that’s not sarcasm, we love it – and here in this superb apartment the furniture arranging is complicated by the presence of 8 foot arched doors spaced about 10 feet apart along one entire side of every room. And that means, friends, that our bed has to but up against (or really head up against) one of these doors. It makes a nice frame for the bed, but not a nice backing. Even with the bed flush against the wall, there’s a yawning chasm along much of the bed’s center, just waiting to suck us in should we stray from our respective corners.

We spent the first three weeks each perched on a far edge of the bed, hollering across, when our eyes had done all the night reading they’d allow, “Good night, honey!” Finally, Kevin had had it, and I was right there with him. We have to have a headboard, something to lean against, anything. Kevin toyed in desperation with the idea of using a big piece of plywood, but we decided that we’d just adult-up and buy a real bed. Little did we know the plywood idea wasn’t as desperate as we’d soon become.

I can tell you after an entire day of bed shopping, Portland has a dearth of furniture stores. We went to all of them. Most of them, I’m sorry to tell you, were sad little places specializing in the sale of waterbeds. I’m not kidding. They do still exist. We found one nice bed at Asia West (we loved many things here, but they only had one bed), but it was a platform, and we – of course – bought the only mattress in the universe with super special boxsprings that must be used with the mattress, or you forfeit your 20-year warranty.

So one day later, we’re thinking of ordering a bed off the Internet, as ridiculous as that seems. We’d love to buy local, or at least see what we’re going to buy before we pay to ship it a thousand miles, but we’ve simply exhausted all of our Maine-based bed buying possibilities. We think. It’s hard to know for certain when you’re so new and so desperate not to fall in your bed canyon.