Mother Goose's Featherbed

Day 57: "Mother Goose is shaking out her featherbed." That's what my mother would say when I was a child and the snow began to fall. Although I imagine that few people know what a featherbed is these days, I knew. We had my great-grandmother's, stuffed with down from her own fowl, and it lived in a box which undoubtedly contained a washing machine or kitchen range originally, the enormous heirloom featherbed filling it almost to capacity. "Almost," I say. The box was labelled "Keep" for reasons which should be obvious, and I called it "Keep" as if that was its proper name. On more than one occasion, my mother found me curled up and asleep inside Keep, buried in the folds of the featherbed in the remaining space which was just large enough to hold a seven year old child. But all good things come to an end eventually, and after my father died and we were forced to move, Keep and the featherbed disappeared. I never learned what happened to them, but I hope that some other small child might have found the same refuge and comfort in the embrace of that ancient precursor to the duvet as I did all those years ago. Today, Mother Goose is shaking out her featherbed, and although it chills this old body, it warms my heart with memories of Keep and contents.