When we left Vancouver, we decided that we wouldn’t need my bed anymore. It was a queen size mattress with a boxspring. It wasn’t the best, ten years old, and we figured we would get something better in Texas. We planned to take it to a recycling centre when we were driving out of Vancouver for the last time. However the people loading up our moving truck convinced us to use them as padding in the truck while we moved. So, the mattress took a lot of abuse as we used it to protect more fragile things from banging into the back of the truck.
The mattress and the boxsprings made it all the way to Texas, and when we finally moved into Catalina’s house in Houston, we decided to use them for the time being.
Then her mother gave us an offer of a king size mattress. It was stashed in Sugar Land, having previously been used in a house the family owned in California. So the first problem was how to get it to our home. We borrowed Catalina’s uncle’s truck and made our way to the pickup. It was a higher end mattress with a strange grid of flexible gel holding it together so it was heavy. There were problems loading it (we couldn’t get the tailgate to go down without unscrewing the back panel) but we finally got it aboard.
We took the slow route back and then unloaded it. The next day we took some time to get it set up. It was clearly a used mattress because the cover had actual blood stains on it. We figured we could take it off and clean it, but at the moment we are between washing machines so it isn’t as easy just putting it in a machine. (Presently we go to Sugar Land to borrow their machines to do laundry.)
The extra sleeping real estate was nice. It took a few days to get used to it, but eventually I got a good night’s sleep in it.
But the first day after sleeping on the mattress we were told that the mattress wasn’t actually Catalina’s mother’s to give. We know it was owned by her aunt, and now she wanted it back. Maybe we could have paid her for it, but it felt like too much trouble and she would probably never be satisfied with what we offered. And if we are going to pay for a mattress, we want one that wasn’t involved in a crime scene. So after three nights of sleeping on it, we packed it up.
On Sunday we borrowed the truck again and took it back.
It was nice while it lasted. But it has taken up our attention for two weekends in a row and now we need some recovery time with a day where we don’t have to do anything. That is not a good attitude for a Monday.