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The truth is, I sleep on the floor.More accurately I sleep on a down comforter draped over a twin-size piece of camping foam, all sort of mushed into a fitted sheet, on the floor.
Aesthetically I’ve never liked big beds with headboards and clunky feet, and practically they’re a pain in the ass to move. Since leaving my parent’s house fourteen years ago, I’ve never owned a bed. I’ve slept on dorm beds and air mattresses and the trusty foam pad. Twice I’ve splurged on low-end frameless futons, and twice I’ve lost them to breakups.
My foam pad rolls up for moving in five seconds, and it weighs five pounds, and it’s worth about five dollars. It serves my needs, mostly.
But sometimes not. Since I started a desk job, for example, I’ve been noticing the decline of my already mediocre posture. Sleeping on my side on a thin mat isn’t helping. And sharing such a small sleeping space has its challenges. Plus the down makes me sneeze.
So I decided, at thirty one, that it’s time for a big girl bed. I started looking around for something suited to my low-maintenance sensibilities. Something close to the floor. Something simple. Something unlikely to have been made in a nastyass factory. Something I wouldn’t have to hire people to move. Half of the planet sleeps on reed mats, for God’s sake.
And since a substantial piece of my new house battle has been trying not to accumulate the piles of crap that the world somehow wills you to accumulate once you have a place to keep it, I was looking for something that didn’t feel like a big fucking Thing. A heavy, overengineered Thing that I’d feel obligated to guard and care for, the way people suddenly find themselves saying things like Don’t Eat On That Sofa!
What I ended up finding was latex. Latex is tapped from trees in Southeast Asia and can be transformed, via a rather old process, into a very resilient foam that makes an excellent mattress. It doesn’t grow mold or harbor dust mites. It doesn’t involve wood frames and metal springs and chemically-treated stuffing. You end up with something that looks a lot like my foam camping mat, except no petroleum products were involved. It costs a lot more but it lasts about thirty years with no flipping necessary, and in the end when you throw it away there’s still nothing toxic about it.
Latex has started to become trendy with the whole Green wave, so now they’re making artificial versions and injecting it into the middle of conventional mattresses, mostly for marketing. Since I just wanted a big block of the real stuff, I started looking online. And then it got weird.
Because there are about half a dozen websites from which you can order latex mattresses – sites that cater to allergy sufferers and green living. And then there is one site for the only company that exclusively manufactures natural latex mattresses and nothing else, and has been doing this for decades. And it’s thirty blocks from my house.
You’d never know it was there, because it’s just a tiny “showroom” with one sample bed, and lots of cool machines where the covers get sewn. They get sewn by a guy named Gary. He’s been making mattresses for forty five years. He makes them out of latex because that’s how his dad did it, and because he thinks they’re the best.
So Gary’s making me a bed. It'll be ready in a week. I’m not allowed to put it on the floor, because latex likes to breathe. But four inches would do it. Movin’ on up.
posted by tortaluga @ 10:19 AM
4 Comments:
sweet! after sleeping on futons for years and recently getting a "big girl bed", i have to say i never want to leave it. but i got platform bed, with sturdy wood and some metal bars...not quite as earth friendly as latex, however i sure do like those bars. haha. ~tal
This will go well with your rubber sheets.
oh, tal. how i miss you.
Is my bed a "big girl bed". Exactly how big does the girl involved need to be?
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