Hundred Acre Woods

I realised after wearing this shirt that this is my hundred acre wood. I grew up moving all over the place, and didn't always have a backyard to play in, or a consistent childhood home, but this was somewhere we always visited every summer and sometimes in autumn. It's a place filled with childhood memories, brimming with imaginative playing and discovery. While the plot of land might not add up exactly to one hundred, it's definitely plenty of acres for a kid to explore and still find new places and details every time.





My cousins and I had certain places we always wanted to visit and play in, like the willows out across the meadow with their maze network of tunnels underneath and between their thick boughs, and the tinkling and trickling little streams and snaked around the growths and gave life to everything around them. We would splash around in our wellies looking for tadpoles to catch and clearings to picnic in.

We also built a fort out of fallen trees and sticks and pretended it was our fortress, and that we were royalty of the forest and each in charge of a certain division- I was princess of the trees, my cousin was queen of the weather, and my sister was princess of the flowers. We could only enter into this existence through a certain entrance, which we deemed the gate to another realm. It was really just a big crack in a rock we could fit through like a gate.





Of course, we loved exploring too, and would always choose a day to set off in a direction we hadn't gone before. We found a little secret meadow this way, as well as a lava flow field full of cool alien looking rocks (Monroe Mountain, and the surrounding range are volcanic). Sometimes if we were lucky we'd come across a deer, elk, or wild turkey. I always wanted to catch a chipmunk for a pet, but my mom shut that one down quickly.









outfit:
Shirt-thrifted
Skirt+belt-thrifted
Socks-harajuku
Shoes-gift

So here's to childhood, nostalgia, and boundless imagination. If there's one thing I learned in Japan, it's that there's no need to grow out of the best kinds of imagining.

TTFN<3