The traveling iron bedstead

(road trip to Walkerton)

This weekend, Bea and I took a road trip to visit with Mamie and Grampa and to do a furniture swap. We were delivering an old iron bedstead, which I’d had since I was eighteen years old, to replace a carved wooden twin bed Mamie slept in as a little girl in Norfolk, which will now be Harriet’s bed. The larger bed will accommodate both Bea and Harriet when we visit.

We had to rent a big truck to transport it (a Ford F-150), and carefully carry it up Mamie and Grampa’s narrow stairs in their very old house in Walkerton. We assembled it, then spent a pleasant afternoon rehanging paintings, most but not all done by Mamie. Paintings of me, Sky, Mamie and Grampa, family friends, Mamie’s grandfather, and various dogs who have been part of our family: Foxy, Chessie, Rowdy. The room will eventually be repainted, so we didn’t worry about where we put the nails or how many arrangements we tried. When the room was done it looked like this:

This was of course in the midst of an extremely difficult time. Grampa is in the hospital again, and here is Mamie’s kitchen calendar:

Moving the bed, which Richard and I stored at home after we (finally) got a queen bed a couple of years ago, made me think about how long I’ve had it, and how many times I’ve moved it. Mamie and I rescued it from a friend’s alley when I was a freshman in college. We refinished it in the parking lot behind to my first apartment, a two-bedroom on Grace Street in Richmond. I never lived in a dorm, but rented that place for $400 a month because I thought it would be cheaper and nicer than living in the VCU dorms, which it probably was. I quickly filled it with roommates, and learned a lot while living there: how to cook, how to study, how many people can comfortably share a single bathroom (fewer than we had in that apartment). Moving in I had zero furniture except for this bed, which was where, doing homework, I propped up my word processor, a proto-computer that had a little green screen and dot matrix paper that wound through the top.

Later I moved the bed to a one-bedroom on Grove Avenue, then a row house in Oregon Hill. Once, one of the brackets that holds the bed’s heavy iron railings broke, and one of Grampa’s friends re-welded it for me. When I got into grad school, I moved this bed across the country to Long Beach, then to Los Angeles and New York and Durham and Chatham County and D.C. and back again. All told, I’ve moved the bed about eighteen times. Richard published a poem with the bed in it, circa our Los Angeles days.

Now it’s in the guest bedroom at Mamie and Grampa’s, a house that dates back to at least 1805 and was an annex to the Walkerton Hotel, accommodating overflow guests. During the Civil War, it was occupied by Union Soldiers and treated as a makeshift hospital for wounded soldiers. Our neighbor Jimmy, who passed away in his 90s a few years ago, was born in the living room. Mamie calls it the Mattaponi Queen, after an old Walkerton steamboat and my first book.

We’re not sure how old my parents’ house is, but it’s possible the house goes back to the 1790s, which would mean it has potentially been around for every single American presidency. In my own life, I can trace it through seven presidential terms. I slept in the bed after driving to King & Queen Courthouse to vote for Bill Clinton in 1996. It’s where I slept when George W. Bush, aided by the U.S. Supreme Court, stole the election in 2000 and then proceeded into a disastrous presidency that cost many lives, domestic and overseas. I slept in that bed (in D.C.) when Obama won his first term, and on the night of his inauguration, which Richard and I attended in bitter cold that we did not feel a bit. I slept there fitfully in Raleigh on the night of the first Trump victory, and I woke up in this bed in Chatham County, energized and sure that Biden would win the presidency in 2020.

Looking back on the chaos of the last four months, it’s hard to believe anything for certain right now. But I’m pretty sure this heavy old bed, and my parents’ creaky old house, will be right where they are when Trump leaves the White House. They will be there when he dies, probably looking much the same as they do now.

Grampa is doing better, but we have a long road to get him upstairs again at home. He’ll do it, because he’s tough and determined, and we’ll get through this fissure in the fabric of reality also, because we are tough and determined and we have to.

What in your life will endure through this time, outlasting Trump? An object, a feeling, a project, a tree?

Lots of love from us.

If you can manage it and live in NC, this free Zoom with Representative Robert Reives, is 7:30-8:30 PM on Tuesday. From hosts County to County/Neighbors on Call: “Rep. Reives, NC House Democratic Leader, will review the election results of 11/5/24 and the impact of breaking the supermajority in the NCGA. Join us at 7:00 for optional social time. Program begins at 7:30.”