Mold

Mold is creepy. My advice to anyone with an old mattress or anyone who lives in a coastal climate (especially one with its most rainfall in 100+ years) is to occasionally flip over your mattress to see if mold is growing. This should be done before the mold has eaten through to the mattress's center. It was awful. Rainbow mold - brown and black and yellow mold. Olive green mold. Pea green mold. Red mold (red!).

Laurel and I did a sort of spring cleaning yesterday, after we had noticed that our windowsills were caked with mold. We had accepted it would be a gruesome job. We knew there was some mold on the floor. We didn't expect the mold-eaten hole in the mattress. Maybe that's why I've had respiratory problems while sleeping for the past few months.

Anyway, the mattress is in the alley now. Let's hope the hoarding next-door neighbors have already snatched it up so we won't have to pay $25 for the city to pick it up. A trip to IKEA for a replacement mattress is planned.

I have a long relationship with IKEA. Unlike most American children in the seventies, I grew up with IKEA furniture. I thought everyone had to make their own furniture, from oddly translated and wholly incomplete instructions. I thought all furniture was disposable. I thought everyone slept low to the foor. I didn't know what a box spring was until I was 22.

My family made IKEA pilgrimages that coincided with family vacations. I remember going to the original IKEA warehouse and factory in Sweden in 1974. I recall later trips to IKEAs in Mississauga, Ontario and somewhere in Italy. I remember big shipments arriving from the homeland (I was born in Sweden, you see). I remember the goddamn green bed, about as comfortable as sleeping on an airplane.

Then, as I pushed 30, IKEA suddenly invaded the U.S. I was thrilled at first. I know where I was the day the Burbank store opened. Do you? Most of my bachelor shelving and glassware were courtesy of the Swedes. When I moved to Minneapolis for my second grad school stint I was a little sad there were no IKEA stores there (this has changed - they put one up next to the Mall of America last year). But slowly I was weaned off IKEA. Laurel, a child of a household of sturdy wood and quality kitchenware that lasted generations, didn't share my enthusiasm for IKEA. When we moved in together, my furniture didn't survive the cut. When we moved to California, 17 miles from the Carson IKEA, she had to be convinced that it was okay to buy a few items from there, that the notions of disposability and home furnishings could indeed intersect, an intersection proven by the disgusting mattress.

So we will buy a lovely boxspring-less mattress and place it above our lovely bed frame, a quality piece of finished wood furniture that emerged completely unscathed from the mold invasion. When the time comes to dispose of the mattress. we will do so, without shame. We will attempt to extend its lifespan by investing in a humidifier. And before I lose everyone's interest, I will stop here.