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Find Your Happy Place
“Find your happy place.”
Starting in the mid-1990s, we’ve been told to find our happy places. It quickly became a pop psychology catchphrase, a way to escape the stresses and strains of life by visualizing and meditating on a place that makes you happy.
When I was little, I had two happy places. The first was my grandparents’ place in East Texas. Affectionately called Heaven Hill (in honor of my Southern grandfather’s favorite bourbon and the fact that the hill the house stood on was the highest point in the county), it was 100 acres of meadow and pine forest located just south of Winnsboro. They built a house big enough to contain their many grandchildren and friends, which was finished in the same year I was born. (No, I’m not going to tell you that it was 1971. That would reveal my age!)
The author and her grandfather at Heaven Hill circa 197mumblemumble
My family and I went to Heaven Hill at least once every month when I was growing up. My father would pick us up from school, one of a series of Suburbans already loaded up and ready to go. We would head out, the radio set to KERA to catch Susan Stamberg, Bob Edwards, Noah Adams, Renée Montagne, and Robert Siegel on All Things Considered. (My sister and I were the most well-informed students in preschool.)
We would stop in either Quitman or Emory at the Dairy Queen for a small cherry Coke and a bag of Fritos before making the final push to Heaven Hill. My father would invite either Rachel or me to “drive” up the winding road from the gate to the house.
My favorite memories of Heaven Hill include the tire swing that hung off the limb of a big old pine tree just off the back porch, bouncing on the “riding tree,” a pine that fell over during a storm and continued to grow horizontally, listening to my sister, my mother, and my grandmother (card sharks, the lot of them) playing Spite and Malice in the evenings, and listening to whip-poor-wills and owls as I fell asleep. My aunt and mother sold Heaven Hill in 2014, but I can still see every single inch of that house and hill if I close my eyes.
My other happy place was the camp on the Pecos River where I spent eight magical summers. After enduring the summer of 1980 (the hottest on record in Texas) in the Piney Woods, my parents decided I needed to go to camp in the mountains. After a visit to some family friends’ place in northern New Mexico, we found Brush Ranch Camps.
As the old Bluebird school bus rattled across the wooden bridge spanning the Pecos River on that June day in 1981, I had no idea that my life was about to change for the better. Brush Ranch became my refuge. I became the person I wanted to be, leaving behind the goofy know-it-all that my peers either pitied or bullied, as I rode horses, hiked through the Sangre de Cristo Mountains, and sang songs around campfires. The days were sunny and warm, and the nights were cool and laden with shooting stars.
The author, the author’s sister, and the author’s mother at camp pick up circa 198somethingorother
And after spending a month in paradise, my family would pick me up from camp, and we would head to Lake City, Colorado, to spend a couple of weeks with my aunt and uncle, stopping in Santa Fe and Taos along the way. The only bad part of that annual summer trip was driving home to the Texas heat.
For this issue of Madeworthy, we asked our contributors to find their happy places, and boy, did they deliver! From Mackinac Island to New Braunfels, from Colorado to Idaho to the Pacific Northwest to Alaska, our contributors are a well-traveled bunch. If you’re looking for ideas for your next adventure, you will find all sorts of inspiration in these pages.
We hope you enjoy this issue, and we hope you get out and travel the world. How knows? You might discover new happy places.
