Making Special #3

Over the past two years including the four moves from my first home, to my first dorms, I have always been at least 20 miles from familiarity. Moving to California has been my biggest endeavor yet and knowing that I couldn’t bring everything with me was a part of the change I was looking for.  

Before making the big change from New Hampshire to California three weeks ago, I was trying to dwindle the enormous pile of junk in my room. The biggest problem I faced coming here was choosing what things I needed most over my enormous collection of yard sale goodies, books, records, fabric, beads, clothes and overall junk. Starting with my closet only created a scarier mess. I did find however, some old things that I had been missing since my first move five summers prior, that including some papers from the fifth grade! It was like Christmas morning amidst all of the wrapping paper. Some of the things I donated were many of the things I accumulated during yard sales and saved because I figured I would make something with it. Like many of the things I have renovated such as my terrarium and picture frames.

Five years prior to that, my family decided to move down the street and into the woods. I was 14, too cool and pissed. Luckily, my parents have always encouraged my art and unlike many parents, allowed me to paint and glue all over my walls. So I went to town hanging frames and maps, using chalk spray paint and collecting leaves for a light that went off in the attic.

 The first tree I painted on my new walls was the giving tree and as I grew, so did the forest in my room. Some were painted, some had real bark and mushrooms i picked up, and others had pressed flowers modge podged to them. Harold and his purple crayon and Max the Terrible came along after a while and over that span of five years, I learned to call the house my home, and my room, my sanctuary. I wish I had a picture to show you because it is one of my favorite renditions and says a lot about who I am today. They are not only special and symbolic because they were of the stories of my childhood, but they’re growing with each new encounter. I know now that when I return, I can take the national geographic redwood poster down and create my own rendition.

For now, sitting in my dorm, adorned with my elephant tapestry, Bob Dylan and Jim Morrison posters and pictures from home only makes it slightly special. Yes they are the same things that have been traveling with me place to place but they only cover the blank walls that I can not draw on. Making Special as Ellen Dissanayake describes it is not  adorning a room with a Christmas tree. Anyone can pick out an agreeable pine and make it pretty with decorations but making it special involves the ones you love most and the act of hanging those decorations that share that a history or a ceremonious pattern.

I was biking in the woods today and came across this stump. I noted that it was special because it wasnt an object of one persons work but it was a collection of shared interests over a period of time all fitting in the same puzzle.