I don’t often do this, but in this “splendid” Covid isolation I don’t have anyone to talk this out with so I’m going to pour it out on the page. Typical writer, right?

So on Wednesday evening a lovely family came and took away the sort-of-antique-beds that were in the casita. The bed I had in Los Angeles will be coming back to New Mexico and I decided a queen with a really good Tempur-Pedic mattress was a better choice for any guests I might have once the plague ends, vaccines happen and life returns to something resembling normalcy.

The twin beds were purchased by my father. I don’t know if it was with his second wife or my mother, but it had been a double bed that got cut in half to form these two twins. They were my childhood beds. Very tall and my mother always had these long dust ruffles that hung down to the floor creating a perfect kid fort. After her death I kept the beds for use in one of the guest rooms. They just kept getting dragged along from house to house like Marley’s chain of cash boxes. It wasn’t until I stood looking at the empty space where the beds had once stood that two vivid memories came back, and I realized that I had been carrying a pain I wasn’t even aware of for decades.

My mother was crazy as a bag of rabid ferrets, and her rages were terrifying. She was my father’s third wife and twenty years younger (He wasn’t exactly a prince when it came to relationships). They divorced when I was three, and it nearly wrecked me. My father was the center of my universe. I mean why wouldn’t he be? After all my mom was crazy. Even during the years of their divorce my dad supported us and I spent almost every weekend with him. When he would bring me home on those Sunday nights to the little house he rented for us they would often have a huge fight. I would huddle in one of the twin beds with the covers over my head listening to them scream at each other. One night after a particularly ugly fight my dad stormed out without telling me good night. I was gutted. I was also a tomboy who loved toy guns and model airplanes and cars and trucks. That night I was so upset that he had left before I could say goodbye I got up, gathered up all my toy guns and brought them back to bed with me. I hugged the guns and cried that night.

A few years later when I was nine or ten my parents got back together. I had pleaded for dad to come back, and I’ve always wondered if ruined his life with my entreaties because their second chance at love didn’t work out any better than the first go around. The fights continued, even worse than before. Older now, I would hide under the twin bed pressed up against the wall and shake. Sometimes I would retreat to the fort with a book and a flashlight. I think that’s where I learned to become so engrossed in what I was reading that I wouldn’t hear my mother calling for me. That didn’t go over very well either and always earned me her rage. I sometimes think she hated me. She said as much to my father. Told him one night that I was just like him and she hated him and she hated me.

So as these beds got broken down and carried away it was like the walls I had constructed around these memories broke down as well. I had worried I would feel guilty giving this furniture away. Would my parents be angry with me? But as I stood and gazed at the empty space where they had once stood all I felt was this enormous sense of relief that they were gone. Maybe now all the grief and fear and guilt and loss can pass away. Time to build some new memories.