| Image via thecleanbedroom.com |
I grew up with comforters, blankets, sheets and quilts (notice the hard ‘t’ sounds). They were all soft, rectangular and reliable. Granted, I was never a heavy user of top sheets, but it was at least nice knowing they were there. By and large, my bedding situation has always been optimal, especially my SpongeBob SquarePants comforter (with matching pillow case). Then I got a wife. And with that wife came this French nonsense called a duvet. For those of you who are as uncultured as I blissfully once was, the duvet, pronounced ‘doo-vay,’ is basically a giant bag of feathers or down inside a removable cover — kind of like a bed-sized pillow and pillow case. Our duvet is fastened shut along one side with giant buttons which, let me tell you, are a real treat to roll on top of when they inevitably rotate to my side of the bed during the night. It doesn’t matter if the buttons begin the night at our feet like they’re supposed to — they’re like homing missiles, bound to eventually find my rib cage before daylight. Fun fact: did you also know the duvet’s shape is light-sensitive? In the daytime, it’s mostly rectangular, much like the blankets I’ve always known and trusted, but turn those lights off and say goodbye to that trusty polygon. Once it’s dark, sleeping under a duvet is like sleeping under a beanbag chair; forget about finding a nice, clean edge to tuck under your side. It’s just a blob, like an amoeba. You can try rotating it, but I guarantee all you’ll find are buttons, more buttons and seven or eight rounded corners you never knew existed. And if it wasn’t enough that the exterior of the duvet has a mind of its own, the interior stuffing is even more free-wheeling. Unlike quilt stuffing, which minds its own business within its fair and equal partitions, duvet stuffing loves a good party, even when decent, hard-working folk are trying to sleep. This means that when my wife does her usual patented barrel-roll blanket grab in the night — which leaves me with about four square feet of blanket to work with — all I’ve got is the empty end of the duvet cover. All my feathers are off whooping it up with the rest of them, deep within Lauren’s coils, and I’m left shivering under basically a thick pillow case. However, after one harrowing year, I’m happy to report that we’ve worked out a system: Every night Lauren and I give each other a kiss, then retreat to our sides of the bed — she to the duvet, and me to the SpongeBob blanket, which is enjoying a nice renaissance back on the bed. I can’t say it really does much for the pastel motif Lauren was going for, but then again, she kind of fouled up the nautical cartoon motif I had in mind, so fair is fair. |
