My Room

Back in business with the Scintilla Project. Here are the prompts for today:  
Day 4: Monday, March 19, 2012

• Prompt A: Talk about your childhood bedroom. Did you share? Slam the door? Let someone in you shouldn't have? Where did you hide things?
• Prompt B: What does your everyday look like? Describe the scene of your happiest moment of every day.

I truly enjoyed journeying back in my memory to tackle Prompt A. 

The centerpiece of a my magical childhood private palace was a four post full sized bed with room below for my Wheaton terrier to sleep and hide. The wallpaper was peach with tiny flowers and the blankets were frilly with peach ribbons woven through in design. The furniture was a rich dark wood, Victorian in style, which didn't seem strange to me since we spent most weekends browsing through antique stores in quiet towns so unlike the place where we lived.

I would lay diagonally across the bed as I was swept away from island to island on the words of the books my father brought home for me to read. I would spread out across the hardwood floor pouring over thousands of bits of cardboard with pieces of pictures on their backs as I painstakingly worked on jigsaw puzzles night after night, sliding them under my bed until I was finished. I would take a running jump from the door on to the bed when I came home with a new cassette I would play incessantly in my stereo while reading the lyrics to every song in their tiny print on the folded inserts.

I would tell my little brother stories in that room and from that room. His room was beside mine and when it was time to go to bed, oftentimes we would lay awake whispering from room to room. He, laying normally in his bed since the head was near the door, and I, flipped upside down, with my head at the foot of my bed so I could squint in his direction. Oh how I wish those conversations could be recorded! If words could become realities, I promise with those bedtime chats we two created kingdoms, creatures, space adventures and hilarity we would still enjoy until this day. We were imagineers, inventors and innocent.

I slept soundly in that room. It was safe. It was comfortable. It was certain in both day and night. When the sun rose,  my window to the world didn't see too far, but it was enough to fill my days with happiness. My bedroom window faced an enormous crab apple tree over my bed of strawberries in our backyard. Whatever the season, I felt connected not only to the world within my room, but that which I could see beyond it.

It was my home, it was my room and I pray that every child has one just as magical.