Jason was engrossed in his homework. Collie and Lillie were across the hall, playing with their three-year-old neighbor.
I took the opportunity to do some laundry.
In the laundry room, I ran into a new neighbor who had acquired her apartment as many of my neighbors have—she inherited it at the death of her grandparents.
She was folding sheets.
“Those are beautiful sheets,” I admired. They were crisp and white, with embroidered details.
“Aren’t they?” she smiled. “Let me tell you about these sheets.”
My neighbor had cared for her grandmother in her final years; her grandfather had died a few years before.
One afternoon, her grandmother asked to be helped from her bed so that the sheets could be washed. She wanted to sit in the living room until the sheets were clean and the bed made again.
“Wouldn’t you be more comfortable in the bed?” her granddaughter asked. “I can make the bed with other sheets.”
“Oh no,” the grandmother replied. “I don’t have any other sheets.”
She told her granddaughter that when she and her husband fled Germany during the war, they carried only one trunk.
Among the contents were the sheets on her bed. The sheets my neighbor was now folding.
“So for fifty plus years of marriage, they had only one set of sheets?” I asked.
“That’s right,” my neighbor nodded. “My mother was conceived in these sheets. And now I sleep in them.”
“Incredible.”
I hoped that my neighbor had not noticed my own wash.
As we talked, I had folded two loads comprised entirely of sheets. Sheets for my kids beds, sheets for my bed, sheets for my parties.
So many sheets.
Leave a comment