I am a bit sad tonight, dear friends, although I recognize that, like our canceled trip to Boston, it is the sort of sadness which is a luxury for one to have. The news, short and plain, is that I will not be attending the Oxford Symposium after all. Saturday morning, as I was preparing for my regular rounds at the farmer's market, I pulled the sheets of our bed and promptly scratched my finger on an exposed spring. Lloyd and I had been hoping to get just one more year out of the mattress, but really, just going to sleep on it is an act of purest optimism. Off I went to the mattress store, only to discover just how long it has been since I've been mattress shopping, and what a rude shock lies in those little price tags. But a girl's gotta do what a girl's gotta do, and in the end I picked out a mattress that should keep us comfortable and well for the next ten years. If the cost of the mattress, including tax and delivery, is roughly equivalent to airfare for two from JFK to Heathrow, ah, well.
Even though I'm just a little sad, and more than a little disappointed -- I had been reading about how the symposium is to be held at St. Catherine's College, not far from the Bodleian Library, and all of my Nerdy Research Girl synapses began firing like mad -- I know that, in the grand scheme of egg history research, this is not the end of the world. There are opportunities for study, research and travel to points other than Oxford. In the meantime, Lloyd and I have another sixteen jars of light apple butter, because I can never have too much of a good thing. We have an extra five pounds of apples, from which I can either make Pierre Herme's Twenty-Hour Apples (sliced apples dressed with sugar and butter, wrapped in plastic, pressed under a weight, baked for ten hours and chilled for a further ten hours) or a good old apple pie. We also have a nice big pot of minestrone alla bunni, which the good professor taught me how to make just last week. We are warm and snug on a cold and blustery night, and that goes a long way toward peeling the skin off any sadness that dares to show its face.
Oh, Tvindy, honey, if it were just a matter of taping the holes shut...well, let’s just say that we started taking extraordinary measures with this mattress quite a long while ago.
It’s not just the holes, or the broken springs. There are actually big depressions in the mattress, and every time I look at them, I get, well, depressed. Ultimately, the new mattress is a good thing, but as my mom told me on the phone yesterday, it’s a grind because it’s like a water heater: something necessary but not fun, nothing you can oo and ah over, but you pay through the nose for it. On the other hand, it does make your overall quality of life much better.