Bramble (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
bramblepatch) wrote2019-01-01 11:26 pm
bramblepatch) wrote2019-01-01 11:26 pm
Snowflake Challenge: #1 - Happy Place
I've got a pretty strong nesting instinct, really - given an opportunity to claim a space, my impulse is to fill it with rich colors and comforting textures, music that's usually got at least some degree of folk influence, warm light. Cloth hangings on the walls - if I don't have anything bigger, I'll run a line along one wall and clothespin scarves to it. Chunky, smooth wood and ceramic tile is better than metal or plastic, if I have a choice. I like to be able to see the sky, or trees, or both. I like to light candles and I generally can't resist the urge to dip my fingertips into the soft wax after I blow them out.
I hadn't ever really considered it before, but I think a lot of what I'm doing is recreating sensory stuff that I associate with Camp N Sid Sen, the church camp where I went with my family most summers and Thanksgiving weekends when I was a kid. The thanksgiving retreats, particularly, are just kind of cemented as safe and happy in my mind and they were so full of sensory goodness - the quilt that the camp director's wife worked on each year, the warmth of the big lodge when there was already snow on the ground outside, picking through the basket of assorted herbal tea bags to find weird flavors my picky eater of a mom never kept in our kitchen at home. The basement craft room, where I learned how to make marbled paper and the lumpiest hand-dipped candles known to man, with its splatter-painted floor and its cupboards full of decades of arts and crafts supplies brought by different camp staff and left behind at the end of the summer. Taking a turn on churning the hand-cranked ice-cream maker, although I was too little to do more than half a minute or so before my arms got tired.
It's kind of funny - I don't really even have the same kind of "yes, that's home" feeling toward the house we lived in at that time. Maybe it's because the house is out of my reach, probably for good - but camp is still there. I could go back. I don't have any immediate plans to, but I could, so it's a safe place for me to leave part of my heart. And in the meantime I can throw blankets on my bed and string fairy-lights over it and have that particular angle where I look out my window and see a pine tree. And life's pretty good.
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Super evocative too, although I wonder, you focus a lot on textures; what about scents? I bet there are some that would take you right back. Beeswax maybe, or the herbal tea?
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