Midwest Memo
French toasty
by Alan Shultz

I tackled laundering the bed linens the other day. It's not in my job description as being permitted without female supervision. There's good reason for that omission. I don't speak French.

We have a duvet on our bed. Duvet is a French word pronounced du:vei. Now if you have to consult a French-English dictionary to make your bed, or to refer to your bed linen, you have a problem. I had a big problem. According to Wikipedia, the online encyclopedia, a duvet is a "soft flat bag traditionally filled with down or feathers and used on a bed as a blanket." Duvets are found throughout Europe. In Scandinavia they are the most common form of bed covering.

It's quite easy to make a single bed with a duvet. You just shake the thing once or twice to fluff it out and let it settle down on the bed. There's no tucking, creasing or folding and that routine required with sheets and blankets. Duvets get a little more complex when you graduate to a double bed or larger version. At that size, you're talking a lot of feathers. There, you've got both weight and surface area to wrestle with.

When our three children were quite small my wife and I took them to Europe to visit my sister, Allison. She was stationed in Germany with the military. Throughout that trip we slept under duvets at my sister's home and at inns and guest houses where we stayed. We learned to love both the soft warmth of the duvet and the ease of bed making.

We were sold.

This was literally two decades ago and duvets were not common in the U.S. We bought four sets of the down comforters and the duvet covers in Germany and lugged them home to the U.S. When we arrived at the airport in Frankfurt it appeared we were looking for the Mayflower, rather than an airplane. We used more than our share of overhead storage that flight!

On the trip home our kids found sleep elusive. All three were awake the entire flight until the very end when we landed. At that point they fell into a dead sleep. Our family was the last to exit the airplane. We packed three small sleeping bodies, four sets of bed linens and all our other carryons onto a luggage cart. The mountains of duvets gave our return home the distinct look of refugees on the move.

So, you ask, what's the problem with the laundering part?

Well, first I should make it plain that I do not wash the down filled comforter part at all. I did that once. I managed to jam the thing into our washing machine. There was, however, no room for water or detergent at that point. When it was all over, there were feathers everywhere- in the air, on the floor, in the washer and the dryer. I had unbalanced loads that had the laundry machines pacing the room, rocking back and forth. It wasn't pretty.

Worst of all, the feathers never

ever dried - they clumped together in little balls and the whole process took the "comfort" out of the "comforter."

This time, on my own, I knew to limit my mission to just washing the duvet cover - the "soft flat bag" part of the deal.

It washed fine. It dried, pretty fine. Some stray Jockey shorts hid in the bottom right corner and eluded drying- but, whatever.

The re-assembly, that's where the problem came.

The duvet cover measures approximately 7 feet by 7 feet. That's pretty big for a "soft flat bag."

Into that soft flat bag my mission was to insert a 7' x 7' down comforter full of feathers.

It was a scene right from "Wrestle Mania."

I was on the bag. I was pulling the bag in all directions.

I tried the inside out reverse pull up. I attempted the hold the corners and invert the comforter folded in half.

Finally, I cleared the room of furniture, laid the "soft flat bag" on the floor and crawled inside said bag with said down comforter.

In French this is called..."stupide."