Kathleen McCall:
Occasional�� Muse�

2003-05-07 - 10:25 a.m.

That's MY Fort, Hey

If you had dinner at my house last night, you ate it sitting on the linoleum. There actually was one chair available, but in order to avoid fighting over it (I would have won) we all agreed to sit on the floor. The chairs - all the rest of the chairs - had been used to turn the living room into a giant blanket fort. How that one chair escaped notice, I don't know. None of the blankets in the house escaped, except for those on my bed, which were strictly off limits. Not that strictly off-limits means anything around here - especially when fort-frenzy hits.

There's something so GoodMom, so virtuous, in letting your kids turn entire rooms into private forts. At least, I think it looks that way; I think the neighbor sends her kid over here to have the chance to make messes, and appreciates me for allowing it. But the real truth, of course, is that mine is the only house that one has to clean up BEFORE making a fort. The kids didn't mess up the living room - it actually looks neater as a fort. And I don't mind eating on the floor, although I nearly stepped on a bottle of catsup this morning.

The truth is that my house IS a fort. It's my fort. It's a three-bedroom mortgaged fort. I come in here, and I have my stuff in here, and you can't come in here unless you're in my club and I only let people I like in my club. I actually like a lot of people, and they can come in and they can bring their stuff, but nobody else can.

Everybody needs a fort. Remember? What in the world is more magical and wonderful than the box the new refrigerator came in? Lord, the possibilities. You could take things in there, a blanket and some stuffed animals and maybe books and snacks - a good fort needs snacks. You could cut a window to peek out, one that shut for privacy. You could put it in the back yard and camp overnight in it - well, it would probably be too cold and scary so you would go inside in the middle of the night, but you might stay all night; you could..

I don't think people outgrow the need for a fort - for a space that belongs to you and you to it, a place where you're safe and you can keep your stuff and hide out with your friends. Maybe we give up using chair and blankets and we make them with money or with titles or even with html, but we still make them. I'm on the process of easing out of one right now - an online fort that I've outgrown, or it's outgrown me. It's a bittersweet process, but at least I don't have to fold up all the blankets and put the chairs back.

I haven't looked under the blankets this morning to see what items the kids' fort contains. I'm not sure I want to know; I was invited for a guest tour last night, but I don't think I'm a full-fledged member. I know it had defined areas for each of the fortees, and toys and some dry cereal in case they were besieged and had to hold out without supplies; it may have sucked up a portable cd player or two, and various other household items.

Forts are a good thing. Maybe we'll go out to dinner tonight.

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