The Napping Cave

Curtains puddling on the floor: a romatic look, until
your Roomba gets involved...

Once upon a time, I took a trip to London and Amsterdam as part of a Model UN trip in high school. (We were vastly underprepared for the actual MUN part, but the rest was awesome.)

Obviously, being in Europe, we visited a bunch of museums and they were full of completely different kinds of things than we usually find in the US, for the sole reason that they had centuries and centuries of extra local history to include. One of the things that I remember being a bit intregued by was the different styles of beds tucked into odd corners of the galleries. They tended to be shorter than modern beds (as people were generally shorter back then), but many of them were either essentially large boxes (with closable doors) or heavily draped canopy beds.

Pinterest and other modern media tend to give us a mental image of canopy beds like the one pictured here but, historically, the design was both more utilitarian and entirely practical. Drawing the curtains on your bed kept all the body heat in! That was a huge deal back in the era of drafty homes heated solely by fireplaces that all got banked at night (so that you didn't burn said home down, naturally). They also provided some privacy in eras during which noble/well-to-do families tended to have servants bustling about at all hours and less-well-off families saw children sleeping in the same room as their parents.

It wasn't something I really thought about until we got the RV. We intentionally chose an RV styled such that the bed is on the opposite end of the trailer from the door. With a window at the head and foot of the bed, a solid wall on one side, and a curtain you can pull across the open side, it is for all intents and purposes a canopy bed. (Or, as the babies consider it, a Napping Cave.) I had my doubts about the curtain initially, to be honest, but once we tried it, I was seriously impressed!

It's not a solid black-out curtain, but it does an excellent job of mitigating light. It does an even better job keeping heat in! Stick two border collies in there with you and close the curtain and you'll be toasty warm. I've discovered that by pulling the curtain almost all the way across and closing both blinds I sleep like a rock, which I think has something to do with the very dark and very warm thing it has going for it (both psyschologically and physiologically, but I'll spare you the science). Either way, it's definitely made me think about all the "technologies" we used to know and use and have more or less lost in our pursuit of higher tech things. This, at least, is one technology I'm glad isn't entirely gone!