Pillow Talk

I have a passion for pillows. I love their soft sleepy goodness. Both feathers and poly-fill are equally welcome in my home. I greatly admire embroidered decorative pillows for the couch or chair, but my main obsession are bedroom pillows. If you stay at my home, better bring one of your own. I have bought several for the guest rooms, but they prefer it on my side of the bed.

This plush appreciation has slowly been spreading throughout the household. My husband was quick to steal back the two pillows we had begrudgingly sacrificed for the comfort of our last house guest. They were originally my pillows. They are all my pillows. Except for the ones that fall on the ground. Once Jane sleeps on it, then it's officially her pillow.

As much as I enjoy this fluffy luxury, there is one thing that hangs over my head a little bit. Every 3 months I have a heart doctor's appointment, and every 3 months I lie to my nurse.
One of the signs that I am not doing so well is that I need to be elevated to sleep comfortably, so being asked how many pillows I recline on is a routine question.

My plethora of pillows serve different purposes. The first one gets wedged slightly between the bed and the headboard. The second pillow makes up for the lack of the first. The third props me up while I read and the fourth pillow is just for curling up with. I use a fifth one to smoother out the sound of my pump. I swear the small mechanical noises it makes are amplified 20 fold as soon as it touches the bed.

Almost every night I'll wake up and I'm sleeping on either one pillow or none at all. So what do I say when the nurse asks me the question? I definitely cannot tell her that I sleep with four. They'd be eyeing me for that transplant list again. Actually, that might be a fun one to have to argue myself out of. "No, no, I'm not sick. I just can't stop buying pillows."

It's not like they really have any identifying markers (except for size and squishiness). I've tried to use the "But this one has white on white stripes" excuse. Karl didn't buy it. Or the pillows. And still, when I see an aisle of plumped up plain white lovelies, I want to bring them all home with me. Saying that I need to replace the old ones works much better but has also over time become an unbelievable statement. Either my pack-rat tendencies or my loyalty (to dust mites?) keeps me from hardly parting with one.

I think I can blame this all on my mother. Ever since I can remember she would travel with her own pillow. The smallest thinnest pillow you've ever seen. It took years for me to realize just how right traveling with your own is. You get to someone's house or a hotel and you are confronted with one of the four dreaded pillows. The flat stiff pillow that you only get one of, the fat pillow which has a plastic covering on it that rustles whenever you move, the pillow with stiff feather ends sticking out of it or the pillow that has been kept in a closet that has not been opened in the year since your last visit. Travelling with your own pillow is a survival must. Many a bad mattress or cheap quilt can be forgiven if you have your beloved to rest your head upon.

Of course, a small amount of ridicule must be tolerated if you are an adult travelling with pillow. You might as well be travelling with a teddy bear. If you are on a plane, order drinks. This helps, but don't be surprised if you get carded.

The one true woe of carrying your own comfort is leaving it behind. Only once have I lost a pillow to a hotel. I now take precautions when I leaving the room for an extended period of time. Leaving a pillow at a friend's or family's house gets a little tricky. At a hotel, you pretty much know that the pillow is irretrievable. You mourn and eventually you move on.

When your pillow is still out there, that's the hardest. Too embarrassed to convey the panic that sets in when you realize what you've done, you must either wait for another visit or beg someone to mail it to you. To date, I have not been brave enough to ask someone to overnight ship a pillow.

There is only one sure way to know that you have your pillow with you when you leave - pack it first. Don't carry anything else out to the car besides that pillow. I also suggest you walk very slowly as to not accidentally trip and use it to break your fall. You don't want to drive for 3 hours with a pillow speckled with mud, grass and fire ants. It will be hard to let your companions carry out the heaviest of the luggage while you safely store your own precious cargo, but you must be strong. The pillow should be used as a flag to mark wherever it is that you want to sit. You may want to keep guard over your pillow to make sure that your travelling buddies don't mistakenly move it to the driver's seat. They may say that they are tired after all of the trips they made, but really they just want you to rest comfortably on your clean pillow while they quietly drive you home.

This brings me to my final casualty of travelling with pillow: the risk of the pillow becoming damaged. I took a lovely pillow (a bit longer than standard, down filling, quite squishy) with a hand embroidered case on a plane going to Toronto. I learned while filling out the customs form that not all ink pens are flight friendly. Now my case and pillow have a beauty mark. The pillow that I travelled with today (king sized, poly-fill, squishy yet slightly firm) has a store embroidered case that it now is speckled with strawberry juice.

I really don't know how strawberry juice got on the bottom of the Tupperware container. It's not like I rubbed strawberries on the outside of it before eating them. And I only had 3. I really really wish I had seen the spill before I slept on it. Anyways.