IT’S the beds that I’m thinking about now. September casts a soft veil across the morning, the dew kisses the grass and all my loves have returned to their everyday whirl with all its fresh ironed shirts and hiccups and scrambles for lunch and the demands of a bus timetable that, honestly, has a little of the fairytale about it.
I’ve given up on that. Sure, they have a digital screen above each bus stop that tells you when the next bus is due, but haven’t you ever stood there staring at the bus notice in blind faith, watching as it tells you that your bus is due in three, two, one minutes?
And hasn’t your jaw dropped in disbelief, as the notice for your particular bus disappears from the digital screen with narry a sign of a bus on the horizon. It is endearing, if only you did not have to be somewhere.
But it’s the beds that I’m thinking about now.
It is September and the dishes are waiting in the sink and my old laptop is groaning under the weight of 1,000 un-deleted emails and the flowers in the garden are calling out for a feed.
Time to get this house in order, I’m thinking, to bring a little comfort to the weary travellers of mine out in the big bad world.
And what my mother has always done is make beautiful beds.
We are ironers, my mother and I. At home, we were a family of eight and I often got the ironing job. It was great because I put on the old record player and dashed away with the smoothing iron as Abba and Leonard Cohen soared me to new heights and brought me to new depths along the way.
I’d dance when nobody was looking, waltz about with my daddy’s shirt.
Once, recently, I confessed to workmates that I love ironing, that I love crisp cotton sheets and duvet covers – smoothing out the creases and making them new.
I iron underwear too and the tea towels – they were all a bit taken aback at that. But we all have our foibles and it’s not that I’m Miss Tidy.
His side of the bed is neat and folded; mine could be entered for the Turner Prize under a big notice saying: “After the hurricane”.
But it’s the beds I’m thinking about.
For no matter what might be happening at home, no matter how your heart was broken or your dreams took a bashing, my mother had a fresh bed ready for you to crawl into.
We had sweet summer meadows on our duvets, brave sunshine yellows and soft cornflower blues. The sheets were crisp cotton and the pillows were plumped. So that when times were hard and my father was ill, long, long ago, he always came home from hospital to the promise of a crisp fresh welcoming bed.
We had clean sheets and soft duvets to warm the life back into him, to hug him and hold him and nurse him back to us.
And if, contrary to the doctor’s advice, there was a small supply of dark chocolate covered ginger biscuits in the bedside drawer, sure doesn’t a man have to live until he dies?
That was so long ago now but you carry the past in your heart and in your ways. I carry home in my everyday too – warm the iron red hot and iron the sheets; make up the beds.
For now, it is a family tradition. Some things are hard to shake.
When I think of us as children, we are a brood of baby blackbirds in the nest, beaks wide, chirping and ravenous, waiting for our mother.
So little wonder now that she finds it hard to break the habit of a lifetime. Wherever she goes, she comes back with at least one loaf of bread. The habit, you might say, is ingrained.
And so is the duvet habit.
“You’re always buying duvet covers, haven’t we got enough?” says my other half.
But I can’t shake the love of a welcoming bed.
In the dark tempests of life, I have crawled in and hidden beneath the duvet – an Arctic explorer finding shelter in a tent from the icy winds below the canvas. Huddled beneath the sheets, sometimes it is too hard to leave and crawl out into the storm.
But, on this fine September day, it is the beds that are calling... the day is a dry, warm one... and so we go on.
