I pulled into the Ingles lot on Saturday for goat milk and eggs and there it was again, the same white vinyl tent with the same twin-size placards, the same man in a polo aggressively not making eye contact with anyone actually entering the store. A mattress sale. In February. Tethered by law, apparently, to the birthday of a man who slept on a straw tick. I walked past it three times and I felt my sinuses close up in real time.
I have been trying, gently and without accusation, to get the women in my life to notice this. Every single federal holiday in the first quarter is a mattress sale. MLK Day. Presidents’ Day. Memorial Day just barely clears the window. It is never a produce sale. It is never a wool sale. It is never, say, a raw honey sale, which would at least make civic sense. It is always, always, always polyurethane foam wrapped in flame retardant wrapped in a plastic tube.
My friend Dana — who runs the lavender u-pick out past Fairview and has, I would say, an unusually developed nose — was the one who first said it out loud at book club. “Brooke,” she said, holding her mug with both hands the way she does when she’s about to ruin your week, “they release them on holidays on purpose. People are at home. The windows are closed. They’re off-gassing the whole neighborhood at once.” I made her repeat it and then I went home and did not sleep.
I have since joined a Facebook group called Springs and Lies: A Mattress Awakening and a smaller, quieter one called Queen-Sized Grief, and between the two of them there is a truly staggering amount of receipt-taking going on. One woman in Boise has mapped every Presidents’ Day mattress sale in a forty-mile radius against the local pollen report and the correlation is, to use her word, “screaming.” Another woman posts a weekly thread where members photograph the tag and translate the chemical names. The tag on a standard queen reportedly contains eleven things that end in -ate. I counted.
I reached out to a sleep educator named Marin Holloway-Rask, who runs a breathwork retreat in Sedona and holds a certification in something called Somatic Recumbency, and she was extremely willing to get on the phone. “The federal holiday calendar was not designed around mattresses,” she told me, “but the mattress industry has colonized it, and every time a consumer brings a new bed into the home on a three-day weekend, that household loses approximately nine nights of deep sleep while the polymers ‘settle.’ Nine nights. Minimum.” I asked her how she arrived at that number and she said, “The bodies tell me.”
My sister-in-law Meredith, who works the front desk at a pediatric office in Weaverville and is basically a nurse, pointed out the part I had somehow missed, which is that the sales always coincide with the start of the late-winter respiratory surge. “You don’t find it interesting,” she said, “that every kid in my office in March has a cough and every one of those families bought something queen-sized in February?” I did find it interesting. I found it so interesting I had to sit down on the kitchen floor and drink a full glass of mineral water.
The thing that really got me, though, was when I went back and looked at Dana. She bought a pillow-top on MLK Day weekend in 2022. By Easter she had vertigo. She had never had vertigo in her life. She is forty-one years old and she grew up on a dairy. She now keeps the mattress in the detached garage and sleeps on a Japanese shikibuton her chiropractor brought back from a conference, and her vertigo is, in her words, “eighty percent resolved on a good barometric day.” You tell me that’s nothing. I dare you.
My husband Tanner, bless him, has been patient about this. He pointed out, reasonably, that we already have a mattress. I pointed out, also reasonably, that we bought it on Labor Day 2019 and that I have not felt truly rested since roughly the second inauguration of Barack Obama. He did the math on his fingers and went quiet. The mattress is now in the barn, standing up against a hay bale, and the four kids and I are sleeping on a rotation of folded Pendletons, a buckwheat-hull futon my friend Sage made from a kit, and — in Ember’s case — a pile of clean laundry she insists feels “more honest.”
I want to be clear that I am not telling anyone what to do. You are a grown woman. If you want to walk into a tent in an Ingles parking lot on the birthday of a slaveholding land surveyor and carry home a bag of compressed chemicals wrapped in what is legally required to be a miniature fire blanket, that is your constitutional right and I will still save you a jar of elderberry syrup. I just want it on the record that I tried.
What I will be doing this Presidents’ Day, instead, is airing out every textile we own on the split-rail fence, walking the kids down to the creek to ground their feet in the silt, and making a pot of bone broth so aggressive it could stand up and vote. We will not be shopping. We will not be lying down on anything that was manufactured in a factory with a loading dock. We will be, as Marin put it before she had to go lead a sound bath, “rehorizontalizing on our own terms.”
And if you drive past our place around dusk and see four children and a woman in a wool shawl lying in a row on the front porch staring up at the rafters, breathing slowly and refusing to go inside — please wave. We are fine. We are, for the first time in years, getting some actual rest.