#im technically about twenty years too young for my current open studio class but that’s preferable rly

[3amsnek]

Top 5 places from your childhood. In as much detail as you can add. Also tag me

Ooooohhhh okie dokie

(I’m very bad at writing and this will be way too long I apologize in advance)

@deeplyjuniper

(This is ridiculously long I’m going to try to put a cut thing in here so it’s not taking up the entirety of my blog thing or something we’ll see how that goes)

1. My closet in my old house

It had a light switch on the inside (a big plus for a child who was Not Big On The Dark- nobody outside could turn off the light if I was inside with the door shut) and was big enough for a little kid to happily fit in. I had clothes and stuff hanging right in front of the door, but past that and sideways there was a little alcove bit that was empty, with a slanted ceiling like the rest of the room. I used to take all my stuffed animals and make a big heap of them in there and then take a book and sit on top of the pile and read for hours (I especially did this when I got a new book that I was excited about, the smell of new books still brings this to mind) 

2. Garden center

Fairly close to my old house there’s a garden center with a little cafe restaurant thing built into it. My mom used to take me there to have lunch and they used to give out little toy frogs and lizards with food to kids and it was one of my favorite things ever. Also plants!! I wasn’t yet allergic to every flower ever so we’d admire all the plant friends and depending on the time of year we’d get flowers to plant in front of our house. There was a five+ year period where I didn’t once go there for a number of reasons and I sorta forgot about it and then I acquired a plant obsession and have been going back a bunch and demonstrating my abysmal impulse control with plant purchases so that’s nice? It’s kinda very cool and I still really like it there but for different reasons which is interesting 

3. The woods behind my old house

We lived on the edge of a very large woods area that my brother and I frequently went into, sometimes with my dad. There were tons of trails going everywhere and we brought notebooks and mapped out quite a lot of the trails and then used those maps to navigate and honestly it was fairly accurate and well done for little kiddos? Most of it was in some form of hill that we lived at the bottom of. A highlight of this was a trail leading down a semi steep area of hill that had a much steeper maybe two foot drop off close to the bottom of it. Someone had put three huge leaf piles there a while ago, and they were doing the decaying thing which somehow made them super springy and essentially somewhat functional trampolines if you had enough momentum? Basically picture baby demon child running as fast as they can down a hill and then yeeting themself onto a leaf pile and bouncing off of it and being ridiculously happy about this. 

4. My grandparents house, specifically their loft

Every summer we went (and still go but also quarantine so not this year) to visit my grandparents for a weekend (they live about four hours away). While we were there we slept in their loft, basically a big one room second story that covers about half the house with a spiral staircase leading up to it. There’s four twin sized beds and I have had the same aggressive preference for one for years, simply because it has a little window by the floor next to it and that’s wildly appealing to my demon brain. Also an old typewriter, (my brother was fascinated with it at around age 8 or 9) lots of boards with jewelry my grandmother made on them, and a dresser type thing that somehow manages to be woven like a basket? But more importantly has drawers with all sorts of semi random things that my brother and I used to love to look around in and play with. In particular they have a funky wooden snake that’s sectioned and moves and for like seven years I thought it was the coolest thing. Also they live on a lake which is absolutely amazing. 

5. [redacted] Studio

Basically as soon as we moved to the state I live in now we found art classes for the overly artistically enthusiastic child I am. I vaguely remember my mom talking to the lady who runs the studio as I finished a painting that we still have (its.....something. it sure is something) from one of the first times I went there. They used to be in this old warehouse type place downtown with minimal space. The tables are covered in paint and every couple years they replace them and auction the old tabletops (they end up looking pretty cool and colorful). There was a main Making Art studio area and then a big room off of there filled with random objects and supplies and also a large multiheaded rubber dragon. I did camps and after school things and all sorts of stuff with them for years and years and then sort of stopped for a while- during that time they moved to a ridiculously amazing new space that I could rant about for even longer but this is already ridiculous so I won’t. I’ve been doing lots of oil painting there for a few years now and also first got to use liquid ink stuff through them so that was very cool 

...Oh my

I have written an essay? Somehow? You did say as much detail as I can add and I probably could’ve done even more but that’d be a little insane so

Have this Giant Mess of a thing?

(Once again apologies for my bad writing skills)