Feather Ticks
© By Abraham Lincoln

Sometimes when I woke up, there was snow on my quilt. It blew under the window and settled on the window sill and on my bed covers.

My bedroom was on the west side of the house, under a tin roof. Rain on that roof was so nice to hear—I still long for that sound (I hope Heaven has tin roofs). 

My bed was an iron frame with wire springs holding up a latticework of wires. A mattress was laid on top of this and that was my bed—depending on the age of the mattress the thickness was from nothing to several inches. 

Some mattresses were made from cotton ticking filled with corn shucks (make a lot of "crushing-crackers" noise) and others were made the same way but filled with chicken breast feathers — called a "feather tick." Mine was the feather mattress that mom made. 

In the winter, mother would take the mattress up and lay old newspapers on the wires and put the mattress back on it. She said the newspapers kept the cold from seeping through the mattress over night. 

Mother saved the breast feathers when she killed chickens and used them to fill the ticks. She also used them to make pillows stuffed with feathers. When you got into a feather tick bed you would sink down to the springs. The feathers inside the tick mattress were soft and you sort of dissolved down into the mattress. Pin feathers are tiny, like sharp needles, and they have a way of working through the ticking and sticking you. The only solution is to pull them out. 

The nice part about sleeping like this was the feather tick quilt would mold itself around your body, the part still sticking up on top of the mattress, and you would be encased in a bed of feathers. And that was really warm. We called them, "feather ticks." 

Anything in the pot would be frozen solid and had to be warmed up in the kitchen before it could be dumped in the privy. If it was 20 below zero outside it was 20 below zero upstairs in the bedroom. It made getting out of bed on a below zero day difficult, but we did it and raced downstairs in long underwear with the button back-flap flapping, to stand beside the old kitchen cook stove rubbing arms and legs trying to get the blood to flow again and warm up. 

And the iron bed wasn’t pretty. The paint was old and chipped. It showed other colors besides what passed for white on top. There was black, red, green and then white. Some flaked off paint went clear to the bare metal and it was now a bit rusty here and there. 

Bedrooms were not show places. Mine had the iron bed and a pot. That’s it. No closet. No chest of drawers (I would have thought a “chest of drawers” was something to wear) and no dresser with a mirror. I mean when I went back to bed the next night I had to drag the covers in place to cover up with. 

I had one light bulb screwed into a white porcelain socket in the center of the ceiling that you switched it on when you got to the top of the stairs. It was only on long enough to locate the bed and then the light was shut off.