Pillow talk

For 20 years I have been sleeping on the feather pillow Nanny Wade used all her life until my first husband stole it from her house. When you take it out of the three pillowcases I put on it, it looks like it has been dragged through plague infested London. Usually I just take off the top two cases and wash them so I won't have to see the naked item. The pillow is so comfortable I took it on my honeymoon with my second husband. In New Brunswick, I realized I had left it in a motel in Truro and we went back for it. This Christmas my husband put a new pillow under the tree. It is the first time I ever heard of a pillow coming in a box.
On the box you can see some graphs and test tubes. The pillow has been tested at Johns Hopkins University. A sheet in the box lists percentages by which respondents slept better using this pillow. The pillow comes with a funnel and a plastic cap, because you have to put water in the back of it. There is a way to do this, and you have to follow the instructions so there is no air bubble. If there is a bubble the pillow will slosh.

Stress
My husband pointed to a yellow sticker on the box. "Make sure you write in," he said, "for the $10 rebate."
I did everything the instructions said to do, aiming for "soft" as opposed to "medium" or "hard."
"Which did you choose?" asked my youngest daughter.
"I like everything soft," I said. "Pillows. Toothbrushes. People." I expected some argument to follow about the people part, something like how can you expect people to be soft with you, Mommy, when you are so hard on them. But no one said that. It was just me giving myself a hard time again.
It was afternoon. I moved Nanny Wade's monstrosity to my reading chair and put the Johns Hopkins pillow on my side of the bed. People wandered upstairs to test it out. They said they wished it was theirs. They said how disgraceful Nanny Wade's pillow was. I hoped the new pillow would really give me the kind of sleep the box said it would. It mentioned dissolving stress. There were things going on this Christmas, in the family, that made me wish deeply for the fulfilment of the promise. Maybe it really was time for space age fibres to have their day.

Bleach
I had often thought up ways to sanitize Nanny Wade's pillow, like removing all the feathers, bleaching them in the sun, and sewing them into a pristine casing, but I had not done any of this. The beauty of Nanny Wade's pillow is that it is cold when you first lie on it, especially if you have left a window open, and you can fold and mash it into any shape you need. You can make it paper-thin on one end and puffed at the other, or dented in the middle, or any combination thereof. On one hand, I was elated to see the end of a sanitation nightmare, but on the other, I did not know if I could go without, and I still don't know.
My visiting eldest daughter, the only remaining blood relative of Nanny Wade in my immediate family, told me to ditch the relic. "It's full," she said, "of ghosts." But I could not do it the first night. After three minutes on Johns Hopkins, I switched back. The second night, I put the new pillow on top of the old one. Tonight I'm going to let some water out of it. Johns Hopkins University says I should let go, and I am trying to listen.

Kathleen Winter is a freelance writer who lives on Butterpot Mountain. Her book of
fiction, "boYs," was published by Biblioasis.