“Would you like a fresh bed?” I ask my grown-up son.
It’s a task we share: unfolding sheets; plumping pillows – no need for words.
We take crisp sheets from the hot press because I am not my mother’s daughter if I do not iron my cotton sheets.
Our boy has grown to manhood from the small child who used to trail behind me as I made the long-ago beds.
Then he was white blonde, a shy toddler with a hearty chuckle.
He was a lover of cafes and French fancies – I’d push his pram down the Ormeau Road and he’d put out his foot and rear up like a cross pony shaking at his pram reins if we passed by the Three Bears, his favourite watering hole.
He had a habit of lying back in the pushchair and sticking out his foot to knock bottles and cans like skittles off supermarket shelves.
Once when I plonked him standing up in a supermarket trolley, he discovered he could open a two-litre container of milk.
The whole of Dunnes doggy-paddled down the aisle.
When I made the beds back then, I’d put on the bottom sheet, then toss our small boy into the centre of the mattress.
I’d take the duvet at both corners and shake it like waves, up and down over him, shouting “The sea! The sea!” and laughing wildly with him as the covers rose and fell.
My nephews loved playing the sea too. They loved when I threw them over my shoulder and ran about the house shouting “Bag of coal for McCann”.
When I draped a blanket over my head and played ghost chasing them around the living room, they laughed harder.
When I filched an egg from their mother’s larder and played egg catch – “Quick, quick, catch but don’t crack!” – they shrieked as they tried to catch it. The egg always broke in the end.
And where have the years gone and where have those small boys gone?
Now they are big men with muscle and deep voices and curly beards who throw down their car keys when they come in through the door.
It was only a moment since we were buying blue slushies and bubblegum ice cream. Now, my grown-up son helps me make the beds.
“It’s good practice for me,” he says.
This is our together time.
He has always loved the colours of the sea. Long ago, he chose a cover that is turquoise and green and white – it whispers of warm days and the sparkle of a yellow sun on Mediterranean water.
My mother believed in good food and a fresh bed. She taught me how to fold hospital corners on flat sheets in the days before “fitted sheets” were a thing.
She bought soft bedclothes embroidered with summer meadows – yellow and lilac and blue – and she made the beds so inviting that it was hard not to jump right in.
In later years, I paid back the favour. The morning after my visit, the phone would ring and she’d say: “I went upstairs and you had made me a beautiful bed and I slept all night…”
And that made me happy… a pay back of love.
Now, making the beds with my son, I put my hands into the corners, he hands me the duvet corner, together we button and smooth and plump pillows.
Together words unsaid float in the air... that love is the blessing of a crisp, well-made bed – a safe haven in life’s storms.
