Sleeping on a guling? An abrazador? Perhaps the anime colored Dakimakura. A petrichor herb scented eye? Ancestrally surrounded by royalty, if not by decadence, by social strata. If pillows are the hats of dreams, ancestral pillows were hard hats of Mesopotamic moon shaped rock,Egyptian wood or ceramic neck supports.

But these late 50’s early Catholic Minnesota mornings become catholic in the supplication prayer to the pillow with promised, if not soon, sacred afternoon de incarnation. The waking conditions confer a figurative if not psychic beheading. Henry VIII, belying beheading and showing concern, for some necks, banned pillow use society with exception to pregnant ladies.

A pillow’s age measured in the airy loss of down, measured in the cover stains, in the folds of sleep. This pillow, becomes a throw, whispers instead of talk, relegated to the pack as a camp pillow.

Would that great wars would be fought with battalions armed with throw pillows in a huge pillow fight with planes being downed. The pillow fight has been an icon in films as far back as 1897 (Who can forget Marguerite Sessler in New Pillow Fight or Rob Schneider in The Hot Chick? )

A dreary dark shuffle down the hallway past the linen closet. Shelves stacked with sheets, blankets and pillow covers folded and allowing enough room for the white carton red circle LSMFT cigarettes to nestle. Into the smoke filled kitchen to the waiting bowl of shredded wheat  bale soaking in the milk.

Now the old pillow has a history revealed when uncased a small feather coughs from the center where a small adhesive tape only partially covers a perfectly round burn hole. Mother’s old pillow.