Building Forts & Imagination

When I was a little girl, I was a princess locked in a tower & Indiana Jones looking for treasure & a girl living in a tent all within our yellow playroom. On Saturday mornings, my older brother would shake me awake & we’d spend the morning piling pillows & draping blankets, stealing sheets from the beds & sometimes using thumbtacks to hold the blankets that just wouldn’t stay. We’d create massive forts that spanned the entire room, complete with separate “rooms” & holes to poke our head through to watch for villains & monsters. For years, a yellow playroom draped in twin flat sheets was our playground. My mother never seemed to mind – I think she was thrilled that we played well together, sequestered up in the far corner of the house. As long as we weren’t burning the house down, she was game with piles of blankets. Sometimes she let us sleep in our creations & those are the nights I remember best, camped out on the floor with my entire childhood stretched before me.

When Harrison was three, we started making little forts – just a blanket draped over two chair backs or couch pillows tilted at an angle. He loved these little magical adventures, pretending he was a puppy dog or a pirate or train going into the sheds, so I began collecting flat sheets. As my mother cleaned out her linen closet, I snagged the flat sheets from the pile of linens being donated to the local animal shelter. When our old jersey sheets became so misshaped in the wash, I folded the brown top sheet & added it to our pile. Slowly I’ve created a “Fort Kit” of flat sheets & laundry pins that rivals anything I dreamed of as a little girl.

Now we create castles & pirate ships, fairy trees & battle bunkers. We bring in milk & snacks & piles of blankets, making our own flags & secret passwords on rainy weekend afternoons, watching Peter Pan & soon, the all-new Tinkerbell movie, The Pirate Fairy (out on Blu-ray and Digital HD April 1) from our own pirate ship with flower-printed sails. We create our own everyday magic, where Harry becomes a pirate & I become his best friend & even fairies can be pirates.

In a digital world that often tells him how to pretend, how to imagine, how to dream, building pirate ships of vintage sheets are the magical piece of my childhood that I pass down, allowing him to make his own adventures.

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