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Front Porch: Odd-sized bed held child's joy

By ELIZABETH BETTENDORF
Published March 10, 2006

My wrought-iron bed is a curlicue confection more than a century old and built to an odd width, presumably to hold two Victorian adults, whom I imagine in stiff nightclothes tossing uncomfortably through the night.

Its three-quarter-size width has proved a pain over the years. No longer made by American mattress manufacturers, the bed's quirky size required me to hunt down an elderly man in Texas who learned to build the mattresses from his father (and, in good faith, let me pay later after I decided whether I liked it).

My mother tells me that she found the bed long ago in a summer colony near Chicago, for sale on the second floor of a cluttered antique barn. The bed was old then, pale-mint green, cheaply priced and not something anyone else wanted. In fact, my grandfather tried to talk her out of it because he remembered as a child in turn-of-the-century Chicago seeing people throw the once-ubiquitous wrought iron beds out on the curb.

But my mother, an artist and interior designer, persisted.

"I loved those beds and I wanted to get one for you - you were still in crib," she told me recently on the phone.

She found a big industrial ship yard where she had the green paint stripped before she painted it a classic, beach white - the color to which it has returned after surviving many decorating whims over the years.

At the time, she covered it in a 1960s bedspread patterned with pink daisies with yellow centers and made from fabric she found in the Miami design district. It was meant to match my hot pink carpet (my choice) and my eyelet curtains (my mother's).

I have carted the beautiful old bed with me through life, bringing it to Florida again when I returned in the late 1990s, stowing it in storage for a while and later resurrecting it when I felt I finally had the room for it.

What is significant to the bed has more to do with childhood memory, than its provenance. Such beds are valuable now, props in antique stores and upscale shops, chic, chipped and shabbified, usually draped beneath elegant mosquito netting and topped with a duvet.

I cringe to think what an old one in the same condition as mine would cost today - but it doesn't matter. I remember my Aunt Margie lying with me in it, reading book after book the night my sister Hillary was born. In that bed my mother nursed me through measles, mumps and chickenpox as well as childhood accidents too numerous to recount.

With its high off the ground design, it required a wooden stepladder for me to climb up as a little girl. The space beneath it made for a great fort, hiding place and slumber party hangout. I read just about every Nancy Drew book by flashlight in that bed, and later, when I returned on holiday from college, I was grateful for its comfort (not to mention the boat-size reading space it offered) after a semester in university-issue twin beds.

I remember the last time I slept in it before leaving for my first magazine job at Conde Nast in New York, lying awake that night knowing I was about to step across the line from childhood to adulthood. I also remember a languorous Miami summer night when my father was away on a fishing trip and my mother and I had just returned from dinner at a hippie tearoom in Coconut Grove. We sat on the bed and she read me AA Milne's Now We Are Six cover to cover without stopping.

I was 6.

Now I am 44.

I still have the old bed and will never let it go.

It is the centerpiece of my home now, in the middle of a large second bedroom/office that opens to a closed-in patio that is now my TV room. I've wondered what guests think, sipping wine and eating brie and looking over at a big bed, built before automobile travel, airplanes and radio, a place of comfort and solitude that offered others before me a place to rest the night.

I have no children of my own and take a weird sort of comfort in knowing that someday it will end up again in an antique store, a chipped, wonderful old bed that will most certainly catch the eye of a young mother looking for something lovely for her little girl to grow into.

And hopefully, grow up with.

[Last modified March 9, 2006, 14:26:08]