Pillow Talk

Today's photos on a blue sky, snowless  morning.....

 Unopened January Rose - American Beauty

The first market daffodils

Brie on a board inset with New Zealand Paua Shell

24th January 2013

Leaving the bed this morning, looking back at my sleeping husband I notice how white the new sheets are - moonshine in the gloom of the bedroom.

The new pillows are white too but I’m really upset about them. They are deep and firm and supposed to mould to the shape of your neck if you sleep on your side.  Mine is softer than my husband’s but all night I wrestle with it - determined to like it. Hardly sleep at all. 

Because I don’t want to admit I’ve made a mistake.

An expensive mistake. But not a crime. Or a sin. You can’t take them back once you have broken the seal on the plastic bag they came in. In the night my husband throws his to the floor and goes back to his old one.

I know I don’t like a firm pillow - in fact I like a very thin, very soft, full of squashable feathers, almost not there at all, pillow.  So I don’t know what I was thinking.....hoping.

And now my back and neck are stiff, aching. And I need to buy more pillows. But I love the new sheets and their shiny high thread count.......

and these lines from Mary Oliver in her poem Roses, Late Summer

......the last roses have opened their factories of sweetness

and are giving it back to the world.
If I had another life
I would want to spend it all on some
unstinting happiness.

I would be a fox, or a tree
full of waving branches.
I wouldn't mind being a rose
in a field full of roses.

Fear has not yet occurred to them, nor ambition.
Reason they have not yet thought of.
Neither do they ask how long they must be roses, and then what.
Or any other foolish question.