Blanket Fort Ideas: A Return to Innocence

Your linen closet is my modeling clay, for I am an architect specializing in nostalgia. Lend me your coffee tables, dining room chairs, and coat racks. We have a blanket fort to build and the time is now. The best blanket fort ideas don’t come from Pinterest – they come from remembering.

Fond memories come to me when I think of the epic blanket forts I’ve built in this lifetime.

In my early years, blanket forts were an attempt to own something, to stake a flag in the ground and say, this space is mine. They were the only way you could watch late-night TV, and only because you sent in special ops forces (your little brother and his friends) to commandeer the television from the kitchen for use back at headquarters.

In my later years, blanket forts have been the perfect dose of nostalgia to recover from grief, write something epic, or share a magical first kiss.

Blanket forts are a return to innocence. A reminder that at one point in your life, your fears, worries, and desires did not extend beyond the underbelly of your parents’ card table.

Gateway Drugs

There is always a gateway drug. Whether it’s literature, film, art, dance, music, or anything else, you tried something that took you down a rabbit hole that would forever change you.

For me it was The Great Gatsby, True Romance, The Temptation of Saint Anthony, The Nutcracker, and top 40 radio. Sure, there’s always a heavier, more thought-provoking, esoteric experience that you can have, but it’s the gateway drug that opens you up to all of it.

It lays the foundation for you to build your creative kingdom upward towards the sky. It’s the key that opens the door to an entirely new reality.

And cynics be damned, you don’t call the key a sell-out for presenting a doorway into the palace.

A Return to Innocence

Sometimes it’s important for us to go back in time and remember a place where we were able to show an open and unknowing act of innocence.

I have not had many of these innocent moments in a long time. The reason being that once you are aware enough of the situation to define it as innocent in the moment, in a way, it loses some of its innocence. Children rolling around in the grass don’t then get up, brush themselves off and say, wow, look how innocent I’m being today.

For the longest time, I couldn’t even remember an innocent moment in my life, which was depressing. So I stopped thinking and just felt my way into it.

And there it was.

The First Date

My mom and I were frantically preparing food in our kitchen and throwing it into tupperware bowls, while I loaded up her china and flowers into the back of my white Pontiac Firebird.

Butterflies were taking up Tuscan spring in my stomach.

I was sixteen and this was my first real date.

Driving up to her house, there was a building intensity, not unlike that feeling on Christmas Eve in anticipation of Santa. I was unaware that a dozen flowers on a first date was overkill. Who made up this rule anyway?

She had once told me in Spanish class that she loved Italian food (or maybe I just thought that sounded romantic), so my mom and I had prepared spaghetti. The scent of garlic bread filled the car and our nostrils.

I took her to Prayer Mountain, the highest point in the small Texas town I grew up in. There I had a full candlelight setting in place. Eight D-batteries lifted music into the air from a tiny boombox stereo, as a setting sun over Joe Pool Lake set the tone.

After eating, we traveled down to the lake shore. She once told me she had never set off fireworks. We shot brilliant light over the water and watched it ripple out over the world.

She didn’t drink alcohol, so we popped a bottle of sparkling grape juice and sipped it as though we were at a Gatsby garden party.

When Anything Was Possible

Three blocks from her house on our return, we had had a wonderful evening, but I hadn’t planned anything past the picnic dinner. How do dates work? Do I walk her to the door? Can I kiss her on the first date? Do I know how to do that?

I opened the car door and we climbed the steps to her parents’ house. We hugged and I turned away, unsure how to construct a first kiss.

That’s when she caught my arm and made it easy for me.

We kissed.

My car was Doc Brown’s DeLorean the entire way home, flying through the air, no sense of time, space, or gravity. There was private fist-pumping, ear-to-ear smiling, and a sense of satisfaction, bliss, and excitement that I had never known existed.

It was the feeling of innocence. A time where anything was possible because I didn’t know any better. I didn’t have to convince myself of anything because it was all just happening. A time when worry never came into play because there was too much that could go right.

Building the Fort

I’m trying to experience that feeling more often in my present day life.

So I’m building a blanket fort. It will be my most grand dwelling yet.

Duvet covers will find top sheets, which will find home sewn quilts, last decade’s curtains, and winter-coat-entry-camouflage. In it will live gunners of truth, troops of creativity, stormtroopers of purpose, and strike cruisers of innocence.

We will set out to prove that gravity is an illusion, along with perceived reality.

Inside we will dream the life we wish to live and then fold space into compassionate action. It will be the death of cynicism, and though we will not label it, the rebirth of innocence.

Fearless.