Sunday Scribblings #12 - Bed

My first bed must have been a baby cot, standing in my parent´s bedroom, here in Austria, in a little village about 45minutes drive from where I live now. I grew quickly and was always tall for my age so I guess I had a bigger bed later on while we were still living there. I was 3 when we moved to Australia and first we lived in a hostel, then with some Austrians who let us stay with them for a while and then with a German family where my mother worked as a housekepper. We had a small garden flat, I didn´t have my own room and I remember my bed being in the living room, with a curtain all around it for a little privacy. My parents soon bought their own house and I shared a room with my brother. We had new beds that were placed end to end against the wall of the bedroom that ended up becoming mine alone a few years later when we started getting on each others nerves too much. I remember the bed I had in this room, it was one of those bases that looked like a mattress with another mattress on top. It felt like a princess bed to me. When I moved out of home to Bondi I bought a similar bed second hand and later a bigger double bed when my boyfriend moved in. His parents bought him a queen sized bed when he bought his own flat at Rose Bay - I´m sure they wouldn´t have if they´d known that I would also be sleeping on it. When this relationship ended - sort of - I moved back home to my princess bed but the queen sized bed in Bondi was often revisited. I started to feel a bit like a tennis ball, moving back and forth and not really going anywhere, so I left Australia for Europe where I slept in youth hostels, at friend´s homes, in B&Bs, with relatives and sometimes on trains or in train stations. It was those nights in trains and on train stations that made me really appreciate the other beds. I also worked for a year here in Reichenfels and then for one winter season in Lech am Arlberg where I had my own small rooms with single sized beds. After returning to Reichenfels I moved in with my boyfriend and we shared a very uncomfortable bed which was really 2 singles pushed togther. Quite symbolic as that´s what we always seemed to be, 2 singles, pushed togther, always with a small gap in the middle that never allowed for 100% comfort. When we moved into our own place we had a couch which we pulled out into a double bed each evening because there was only one bedroom in this flat which we used as a children´s room so my husband and I slept in the living room. We built our own house in the years while our children were in nappies and kindergarten and I insisted on having a bedroom for each child, a bedroom for us and a guest room. My husband reluctantly agreed to the guest room - he´s happy about it now because about once a month he is the guest. When we seperated I took apart our king sized bed and put it away in the cellar. I drove to ikea, bought a nice country looking, wooden bed and painted it green. This is the bed I now share with Erich. We have one large matress and one large quilt, there are no rifts, no gaps, I feel comfortable in this bed, it´s ours.