I Love My Bed

I am in love with my bed. I am thankful for it. I appreciate it so much. Because I vividly remember the days when I didn’t have one.

Many moons ago I got accepted into graduate school at the University of Wyoming. Mel and I packed our meager belongings and U-Hauled ourselves up to the land of snow and wind. One item that was noticibly absent in the U-Haul was a bed.

We lived on the top floor of a run-down apartment building that looked like it was built during the Civil War. We developed some serious calf muscles by walking up or down three flights of stairs whenever we went anywhere. The place was so run-down that even rats considered it inhospitable.



But it was cheap. And graduate school was expensive. We tried to save a penny however we could. Buying a bed certainly wasn’t in our poor-college-student budget.

But an air mattress was.

So we slept on this air mattress for half a year. Nothing says comfort like coming home from a long day of work and school to lay down on a puffy air mattress (or sit in the disgusting chair we bought at the Salvation Army).

We had this pump that we (I) would use to inflate the mattress every night before bed. Then, after a few hours, the mattress would start to deflate. And we would slowly be rolled to the middle of the "bed". Over the course of the night, air magically escaped the mattress so that we were barely off the ground by morning (if we were lucky).



And the back aches? Holy Sweet Mother. The back aches! By the time we woke up, our backs felt like they had been pounced on by Kareem Abdul Jabbar.

Despite the sleeping challenges, our time in Wyoming was amazing. If I could go back in time, I wouldn’t change a thing. And it will come as no surprise that the first thing we bought when we moved back to Utah was…..a bed.