My Eyrie

My blog profile refers to our grown up family "feathering their own nests" but it occurs to me that I'm also building a nest. I call it my eyrie and it's under the roof in one of our attic rooms.

Since I'm past the egg-laying stage what I'm hoping to hatch there are ideas: creative ideas to enrich my life. The empty-nester has transformed into the nest-builder.

(An actual eyrie I photographed in Ontario, Canada)

As a child I shared a room until my siblings left home and had never really made a room my own. Even at college, living in halls of residence, when I had a single room for a year I didn't relax into it. While my friend, Pat, down the corridor transformed her cell into a nest, personalising it with pictures and fabrics, mine remained unchanged and institutional. So making a room of my own now is a big deal.

Memories are made of this

This Nativity hadn't seen the light of day for 25 years, since the Christmas that a proud little girl, aged 5, brought it home for her (even prouder) parents.
It is one of the many treasures that I dug out of the blue metal trunk holding all our family photographs and anything of sentimental value from the last 50 years.

Not for me the well-organised family albums and record files for each of our four children, so now was the time to compensate by compiling a mini-history in a box for each of them. I wanted to make sure that they all had a piece of family history going back 2 generations as well as a small selection from the hundreds of photographs of their childhood years, school reports, letters, cards, certificates of achievement and early examples of their writing and artwork (like the picture above).

The four boxes are now complete and two were handed over on Christmas Day. I didn't know how they would be received so placed a small label saying "Memorabilious Box" on them for if they appeared a bit too sickly sweet. I needn't have worried in respect of the younger ones who rummaged through their boxes enthusiastically showing all to their patient other halves. If their two elder brothers also approve then the mining of these memories will have been well worthwhile.