Blanket Forts Are the Best

When I was young I loved building forts in the basement of my house. There was never much planning involved, I would simply feel a sudden inspiration and then I'd start grabbing anything I could find that could be turned into fort building material. Card board boxes, blankets, pillows, sleeping bags, clothespins, couches, rubber bands. I'd spend hours figuring out how to attach all these objects to each other and to the ceiling and walls. Blankets and sleeping bags were the basic building blocks. They would form the walls and roof of fort. The clothespins and rubber bands were nails and screws. I would use them to attach the blankets to each other and to solid parts of the basement (ceiling, walls, bookcase, couches). Pillows would then become the doorways and beds and couches in my new home. If I was lucky enough to have a large cardboard box lying around (the best were the huge refrigerator and washing machine boxes) then I would create little side-tunnels and hallways to secret rooms of my fort.

I would continue adding and adding to my creation until I became too tired or hungry to build any further, which sometimes took hours and hours. Often the fort would cover a whole half of the basement, making it impossible to get from one side to the other without crawling and winding your way through the tangled maze of my cozy hideaway. I would then leave my fort standing for as long as possible (it depended on how long it took for my mother to become too annoyed with the mess), which could be anywhere from a day too a couple weeks. When I would finally have to take it down, it would only be a matter of time before I started the next one.

For some reason I started to think about my fort building days this past weekend. Maybe it was because I had a lot of excess time to do anything I wanted, like in my childish days, but I suddenly had an urge to relive the joy and adventure of tearing a room apart to make another room of your own design. Since my own college dorm room wasn't really adequate for fort building, I convinced my girlfriend that we should build one in her town-home room. She wasn't entirely thrilled by the idea at first but that was before she knew that I was a master fort builder. It was difficult at first since I had limited space and materials to work with, unlike my work-space back at home, but eventually I managed to throw together a workable blanket fort, complete with a mattress floor, a lamp (which doubled as a ceiling beam) and a mini table for snacks and drinks. Here's what it looked like from the outside:

Kinda shabby by my own blanket fort standards, but it reminded me of easier times, when the biggest issue on my brain was whether Mom was going to make me eat broccoli for dinner (if so I might as well just stay in my fort). The older I get the more responsibilities I take on, and the less time I have to devote to simple things like blanket forts. It may seem childish, but I wish that life could be as simple as it was in those days.

So every once in a while, if I'm feeling bogged down with too much work or stress or I'm just sick of being grown-up, I think I'll check back in on my childhood and throw together another blanket fort. Then I'll crawl inside and push aside responsibilities and worries for a while. Those things simply aren't allowed in blanket forts.