Pillow Talk
When we went to the Bar Mitzvah at the end of October, Gary accidentally left his favourite pillow at the home of daughter Susan, in North Vancouver.
Susan didn’t have time to mail this item, but three weeks later, had to make a trip to a town near us, and she brought the pillow! I met her in Valemount, and proudly ferried the pillow back to Gary, who was duly grateful.
The pillow smelled a little stale, and so we thought we’d wash it. I simply threw it, with a few items of my clothing, into the automatic washing machine at the local laundromat (why we don’t have laundry facilities here at home is a different story). It BURST.
I had a washing machine load of feathers and clothing to deal with. Ever resourceful, I got bags and, first extricated the jeans, shirt and pillowcases, then, handful by handful reclaimed the wet feathers into a different bag. I confessed to the laundromat owner, and then I ran to my hair appointment.
My hairdresser, who is also a friend, greeted my pillow story with peals of laughter. She said, “Ann, I’m afraid that you’ll just have to consider it GONE and LOST. It will NEVER feel the same or smell the same, no matter how you rebuild the pillow. Don’t even try; it will not work!
Undaunted, I stopped at the fabric store and found feather ticking, and some piping, as Gary’s pillow didn’t have just PLAIN seams. At home, I emptied the feathers (a sticky, heavy mess) into a large cardboard box and set that by the wood fire in our basement. My clothing that was washed with the feathers looked like it would never be the same… solidly covered with feathers and tiny particles of same, impossible to pick or vacuum off.
In the following days, I stirred the feathers several times per day and was delighted to find that they were drying well and smelling less and less like wet geese, or what I imagine wet geese smell like. One evening I sewed up the pillow covering, using measurements from the old pillow that I had also saved. Since I knew that a few handfuls of feathers had been lost, I reduced the measurements slightly, so that the “loft” of the new pillow would be the same. The contrasting “piping” around the edges looked quite smart. I felt quite smart.
And when I presented Gary with his new pillow, he seemed pleased. You know, it isn’t a “security” thing, he explained, just a comfort thing; he finds other pillows too stuffed and they hurt his neck. He told me that he had liberated this pillow from his family’s cottage MANY years ago, and that his GREAT-grandmother had sewn it.
I would say that if I had realized that his great-grandmother had made that pillow, it MIGHT, just might, have occurred to me that it would not survived the automatic washer treatment!
All’s well that ends well.
~Ann
Nice!