Imaginary Homes

It's funny reminisce-y I feel, having my parents here. This morning, I was procrastinating from waking up, and instead was remembering all of the different places where I felt at home, even though I stayed there for no more than a week, where I cannot return, and that sometimes I miss in ways that I can hardly describe. Spaces grow on me quickly, and I learn to love places deeply.

Here are the top three:

1. Chris's trailer in Eatonia. I never thought I'd miss that place, considering how disgusting it was when he first moved in. But we worked on it all year. When he knew that we'd have to live there for a week after we got married (as we packed up his place), he really set to work making the place not only liveable, but lovely. He made curtains (really basic ones, but they were pretty). He decorated. He bought a bazillion little white candles, these pottery bases for them, and a whole bunch of river rocks, and put them wherever he could. The place was perfect, for a week vacation in the summer. It felt like a nice cabin, especially because the window beside the kitchen table (that had a fluttery lace curtain) opened into a huge tree that was almost trying to get in. I was so happy there. And it had a fantastic bathtub (this is a theme with all these places, oddly).

2. The hotel room where Lyn and I stayed in Paris. It had the deepest bathtub ever, with water pressure that I wanted to keep forever. Our room was so sunshiney and yellow, with this huge casement window where you could sit and watch people walk down the Rue de Courcelle, and drive around the Courcelle Etoile. Mmm...

3. My tiny little closet/room at Camp, where I stayed during my church's month-long retreat called Scripture Studies. Everyone else had to share rooms, but I had this little room to myself, every time I came to spend a weekend. I could do my homework at my little desk, or wander around and join some kind of deep and supportive conversation. Or I could go and be in my very own room, and work for as late as I wanted, because no one would notice. It was my little hiding place. Somehow, I constantly miss that room and that building. (Funny, because it was all lead paint flaking into the fabulous clawfoot bathtub...)

Somehow, I hold these places in my heart. It probably has a lot to do with how happy I was at all of these places (oddly, I last stayed in the third room just after my grandfather died), but there's always something else. Something I can never get back.