Night stands and Naughty thoughts

The night stand has such an innocent name. Most people have a night stand as it comes with the bedroom furniture. Since a young age, the "night stand" had revealed itself to me in its true form as the naughty drawer (I was visiting a relatives home, snooping), evoking strange thoughts and new ideas.

Being married since the ice age, we have a naughty drawer. Most couples who have been together for any number of years have such a drawer. While single, most naughty drawers contain contraceptives, lotions, candles and perhaps a thong or two. Even in pubescent newlywed bliss and blindness, the combined items of individual sexuality can be found in the naughty drawer. The proximity of the naughty drawer is of utmost importance. In the heat of the moment, no one wants to get out of the warm bed and walk, exposed, across the room or into the next and grab whatever is necessary to carry out a night of passion. It the same concept as to who loses the bet and has to sleep in the wet spot.

As relationships age, so do the items in the naughty drawer. Since the birth of our children, we use it as a make shift rite aide; flashlights, candles, massage oils, cold medications, earplugs, Kleenex, some old Christmas stocking stuffers I seem to annually misplace, an industrial-sized padlock for our bedroom door and a boom box. BB King’s opening serenade is immediately followed by several groans from our teens bedrooms, "EWWWWW! Not again!" Why be so obvious? The reasoning is simple: To insure celibacy in our teenagers (we are still counting on the gross factor of humping parents to dance in their heads and that their libidos haven’t quite kicked in) and self preservation. Long ago in a galaxy far away, our children were safely tucked into the young hours of the evening. My precocious five-year old daughter, crawled out of bed, answered a phone call from my sister and when asked where I was and what I was doing, answered, "She and daddy are breathing, giggling and talking in their bedroom." We will never live it down. To this day, my sister will call, snickering, asking if she is interrupting any breathing and talking sessions.

As the anthology of our naughty drawer spans before my marital lifetime, I can see into the future and the contents turning it back into it's former self: A night stand. The use of romantic enhancements will evaporate into accumulating rite aide items with the added old fart shopping list: Ben Gay, Viagra, KY jelly, Hemorrhoid cream, reading glasses, ace bandages, teeth and large cotton granny undies. Being a frugal person and I would assume in my old age, I’ll probably use my former thongs for dusting. Waste not, want not.

Currently our naughty drawer has evolved into something that is desperately kept from our kids, therefore it is also secured. When we get in the mood, we secure our bedroom door, and upload the latest BB King CD. Our new strategy dictates to wait five minutes for the inevitable knock from our nosey teenagers who were perfectly content on their computers and game boys just moments before. We answer gruffly, telling them we are busy and turn up the volume, anxiously awaiting for the, "Ewwww, not again" groans.Satisfied that we have a few moments of uninterrupted bliss, we turn down the lights, fold back the covers and crawl into bed. My husband reaches into the naughty drawer to retrieve our small ice chest. As our fingers touch through the ice, we simultaneously grasp our dove bars. Anxiously unwrapping the bars, we bite through the chocolate, sigh satisfactorily and savor the realization that we have an entire carton at our disposal, thus ensuring at least ten minutes of rapture.