Yesterday afternoon, I disassembled our deep amber American Empire bed.  In a few weeks I will drive it to San Diego.  

My wife’s family hails from Texas, part of the original Texas Five Hundred.  When we first met thirty years ago, she spoke wistfully about her house growing up – the old wooden furniture, the strange objects and curios repurposed by her parents.  But her family had dissolved and the furniture had been cast to various storage lockers and garages of relatives and strangers.  

I dreamt that one day we would rebuild that life for her, that we would bring that furniture together in a some grand house, and appoint that space with her childhood memories and somehow make her life whole again.  

Which over time we did.  The last couple bits, including this ancient bed from East Texas — the bed, we imagined, of her great grandmother and the bed of her parents came to find it’s home in Sebastopol. We fit it with an organic latex mattress.  And now life, I thought, could once again be whole.

Except not so much.  The headboard was too tall and would not fit in any room except that master bed. But the  bed itself was small – more narrow than a full, and of such insufficient length that it betrayed how height deprived our ancestors truly were.  When our dog jumped in the bed, we were truly squished.

And now we’ve come to abandon our house, making room for a family that lost their own home to the Sonoma fires.  We are clearing our home of detritus, of those things – all those things – that don’t work.  The new family is coming with their own king sized mattress. And so one afternoon I call my wife at work.  “I think we should get rid of the bed,” I tell her.

Get rid of it, she answers.  Her family failed to survive an alcoholic father and the suicide of her mother.  I look at this American Empire, and I think, some things can’t ever, in all their undoing, be reconstituted. The only thing left, well, is to seize the future and make life new again.  

And perhaps, that is what that bed was meant to be.