Room At The Top

Friday, July 18, 2014

     I drove my guests to Carcassonne, leaving at 6:00 a.m., so they could get an early train to their next connection.  Beau sat in the back on the way there, next to me on the return.  He seems to have recovered his comfort level in the car, which had not been good since the drive from Montpellier June 16, when I put him in the back seat.

     Dogs perspire by foaming at the mouth, and some dogs perspire from fear.  When I first drove with Beau from Montpellier to Caunes June 16, he was a study in panic: by the time we reached Caunes, his muzzle was drenched in white foam.  It has taken a couple of weeks to reaccustom him to being in a car --and to train me to keep water nearby.  However, he now sits in the car without the "doggie seat belt" I used when we first started driving together, and watches the world from the car window with interest.

     He is lying on the king-sized bed on the top floor of the house as I write this post.  I shipped over the  bed because I knew it would be impossible to find an American-sized bed in the vicinity of Caunes.  I could not imagine having visitors without providing beds close to what they sleep on at home (having slept on too many small mattresses in guest rooms in my time).  There are people who travel to Toulouse to buy the kind of "memory foam"in imitation of the "Tempur-Pedic" brand, then cut beds to size, but I thought that beyond my capabilities.  So the bed traveled here.

     The day the container arrived, the bed being as large as it is, I discovered --somewhat anxiously-- that it none of its pieces were narrow enough to make it up the winding stairs from the first floor to the second; and assembled, the bed would never fit in any of the downstairs bedrooms.  Fortunately, though,the shippers were able to hoist the two parts of the boxspring through the top-floor window. And the mattress itself is flexible, so the king-sized bed is now in the bedroom on the top floor, a room the previous owners rarely used and which I had no immediate plans for.

     My guests who slept there having been the first to use it, I had no time to appraise the sleeping arrangement I had created.  As they told me, it is delightful here, as the large, shuttered window looks up to the foothills near the Carrière du Roy  and lets the sunshine in.  Beau has taken to his new sleeping option and is enjoying an afternoon snooze, lying next to me.  A rinky-dink CD player plays "Afternoon in Paris", jazz violinist Stephane Grappelli's homage to the City of Light, and we are well out of the steadily increasing heat of the day.  All is well.