"Home is what you make it.

My Family didn't move when I was a child. We lived in one town, in one house, until I was old enough to leave and go to school on my own. My Father tells me that the inside of the house used to be white, but as I grew up and became more interested in artistic pursuits, he let me lead the way in decorating the house. When I think back to that place, I don't think of whitewashed rooms and wood floors, I think of murals we painted together with him protesting all the while that he wasn't artistic and brightly colored tiles he collected while traveling. I think of shelves of found objects we turned into decorations, and woven rugs to keep the floor warm. That house was the center of my world for a long time. Family gatherings, parties with friends, a safe haven for my schoolmates to spend time in, even serving as a makeshift Temple Church for a while, that home was everything, until it wasn't.

Once I was old enough to leave home and pursue my own schooling I had to seriously reevaluate what I thought of as home. Not only did I have to travel to go to school, but I had to travel far, and once I got there, the school moved around a lot. For the first little while I didn't have my own tent, even, so I was shuffled around from free cot to free cot even within the camp itself.

I felt, I dunno. Kinda rattled, I guess? I struggled to make friends for almost the first entire year I was at school. The kids in the camp all seemed so talented, and so sure of themselves, and I was still like, figuring things out. Then my teacher put me with another Felis, trying to find me a place in the camp that I'd want to stay. His name is Alex, and we knew we liked each other right away. I guess misfits kinda cleave together when we can. Though Alex I met Keys, and Jill, and before I knew it I had a whole new branch of my Family at camp.

It was then that I began to learn about what home meant to me. It was two things, turns out. One, it's where my Family is. Once my teacher found Alex for me, and Alex introduced me to his friends, I had my Family with me. The second thing I learned on a visit home is that it's a thing you make with your hands.

During that visit home Father told me about the white rooms for the first time. I looked at our teal and orange kitchen, the rainbow family room, the pastels of my sleeping nook. There was nothing whitewashed about our home, not anymore. When it had been a house, a building where our Family started, it had lacked decoration, hadn't been molded by the loving hands that would come to live there.

When I returned to school I decided that I had to make things my own. I embroidered decorations into my new tent, a gift from my Father for completing the first year of my training as a Jester at school. I made pillows in the crafting tent to learn to sew, and then stuffed my tent with them. I painted my desk, my cot, and my camp desk. I decorated anything that would hold still long enough to let my ply my creativity on it. As fall began to bite crisply into the long Summer afternoons I had spent sweating over my things, I thought of how I had made my home a thing that could travel with me. And I went back to the crafting tent, and asked Sunny to teach me to make a coat. We made something simple of light cotton, just something to keep the wind off me.

As we travel, and the weather has grown colder, I've collected fabrics from each place we've gone and have started to decorate the coat with them. So far it's mostly my left arm, but Alex got me some bells to make the hod look more like a Jester's cap, and Keys and Jill tooled some leather for the elbows.

Home is what you make it, and I've made my friends, my family, know they're as special as they are. They show me how much they love me with their never ending support. And together, I know we're going to build things even more beautiful than a Jester's coat."

World: Knights of Nodd.
Characters: Rose P. Sheild.
Media: Easy Paint Tool SAI and Microsoft Paint.
Art, ideas, design, and character © me.

-Topknot