Dispatch from the Girl's Fort by Angie
Hi, Angie here. I’m writing this from my girl fort, my nest within a nest: my Chinese wedding bed.
Within a few months of starting work at Cargo, I fell madly in love with a simple red Chinese wedding bed. It sat on a high platform, with elaborately carved posts painted with animals and fruit and people in robes, and it was studded with mother of pearl. A cozy enclosure ran a few feet up around three of its sides, and an airy lattice capped the top. Who was I kidding with my sleek Jens Risom couch? So not me. I needed this wedding bed. I sold the Risom and installed the Chinese wedding bed flush against my living room’s picture window.
In the three-plus years I’ve owned it, it’s become my version of I Dream of Jeannie’s room in a bottle. I layered an Indian cotton pad on top of its mattress and strew it with Cargo’s kanthas and pillows I harvested from thrift stores. At Goodwill I found a red tray table originally from the Korean Women’s Association, and now it’s in the bed, stacked with books and an old Murano ashtray full of pens.
Now that we’re shut in, my Chinese wedding bed has become even more of a comfort center. Mornings, I pull a blanket over my knees and work on my latest mystery while my two cats lounge around me. Afternoons, I take a pot of tea and a novel to the bed and, between reading chapters, ponder life and watch the occasional masked jogger pass by. Evenings, I might slip on an old kimono, shake up a martini, and take in a Carole Lombard movie on my laptop while lamp light casts lattice marks on the ceiling.
One thing the pandemic has taught me is that the little things are the big things. Over the past five weeks, my Chinese wedding bed has been a big little thing.
