Ode to Flannel

There are countless reasons—actually, I could count them, but I don’t want to—that I would never live in the South. Right up there with lack of reproductive freedom, degraded voting rights, book banning, and Ron DeSantis is that I would never get to sleep between flannel sheets.

I love sleeping between flannel or, more precisely, between a flannel fitted sheet and a down comforter encased in a flannel duvet.  Just writing that makes me want to go upstairs and nestle in.

I love fall. It is by far my favorite season. The leaves turn crimson and gold, burnt orange and honey, russet, bronze, lemon yellow. It is glorious. The mornings are deliciously, bitingly crisp. The soft, hissing, cleansing rains begin in earnest. I get to wear boots. I make soup.

But more than any of this, the best of all of the wondrous things about autumn is this: Opening wide the windows and slipping into a flannelized bed. Settling in, cocooning myself, breathing in the cold night air—the window must be open wide, the colder the outside temperature the better—I experience a full-body rush. The feeling is simultaneously cozy and sensual.

If I were to therapize about this—and why not?—I would say this: Between my flannel sheets, I am, by my own making, by my own design, protected from the “world” outside (the room with its wintry air). I have created a safe haven. And it feels so good. And I did it myself. And that feeling never pales, from night to night, month to month, until I must, with regret, switch to spring and summer bed linen.

I’ve been rereading The Body Keeps the Score as I delve into research for the new book I’m writing. It’s about how trauma rewires the brain, how the body holds trauma. You know what? Sleeping between flannel sheets rewires the brain too.