Four Girls and a Narra Bed

We find ourselves huffing and puffing, my seventy-year old Mama shouting for us to tilt the legs more so that its heavy frame could slide into the narrow opening. There we are, my mother and me at the foot, Mama and our helper at the head. We go down, trying to fit the frame into the narrow gap between the first and second level of the stairs. We almost break the bulb on the ceiling but even then the heavy frame of the bed would not budge. We try sliding it in a slant location, turning it almost vertical, then totally horizontal, until five minutes into maneuvering, we realize that we have to flip the bed so that the side of the bed with legs attached (the other side’s legs being the headboard itself, which we have unscrewed earlier) should be last and so we push and huff and bring the heavy bed up again, into the room, and bring it down again in the proper position. This time it goes down, heavy yet steady out of the bottleneck that is the landing between the two stairs. It does seem amazing to think how the four of us—Mama with her weak right arm, my mother with her hypertension and kidney ailment, and Ate Rocel and I could manage to bring down the bed to the ground floor, ready for moving.

Two more beds, a cabinet, and we are drenched but strangely happy, how even without a man in the house we accomplish feats such as this, with just the right mix of brawn, brains and belief.