Aesthetics

Dear Reader,

I don’t know why everything has to have an assigned “aesthetic” these days. I guess the kids that grew up with “themed” birthday parties felt like everything needed a theme in adult. Most women love to show off their “farmhouse” kitchens, which I think are super cute, but it amuses me because it kinda lacks some things, like medicine bottles in the fridge and maybe a bottle of rubbing alcohol behind the sink (but nobody knows if it’s the human bottle or animal bottle and is secretly scared to use it for either purpose just in case they are wrong). Most people’s aesthetic for their living spaces just tend to be a result of that person’s lifestyle and personality kinda thrown all over the room (at least for me). But I’m not really sure that you could put an aesthetic label on my room.

I like the idea of a fairytale room with a bookshelf of ancient tomes of wisdom. I even have a forest green floor to ceiling shelf to match. But since I share space with sisters, my books are kind of just unceremoniously crammed onto my assigned shelves and it requires me rummaging around while standing on a chair to find certain books like a scholar in an ancient library who no one knows if they are just crazy or wise beyond their years. (I am not sure my dad is up for making a rolling ladder). But the semen tank right next to the bookshelf kinda kills that vibe.

Sometimes I think maybe my room resembles an emporium that antique collectors and treasure hunters frequent, to find the old map that they needed, like the old yellow maps from National Geographics that I saved from trash piles during house purges, or that one trinket that is actually a priceless artifact of antiquity. But most of my trinkets and old things probably only hold value to me, like my grandpa’s knives or the horse molars that we found in the feed trough as kids (I used to pretend they were wooly mammoth molars). The treasure hunters would also have to shove aside some unfolded clothes to find some things.

I think that I sometimes capture the horse girl or 4-H kid room vibe. There are lots of trophies and ribbons stowed in random places along with old sewing projects and pictures. There is one Breyer horse on a shelf that survived our childhood. The not so expensive ones are in the closet somewhere along with the barn and my old riding helmet (we only wore those at the shows). There aren’t any posters of horses on my walls, but shoved up in the bookshelves somewhere are all the books my mom bought about horse breeds, horse health and anatomy, and other things a horse crazy girl wants to know so she can place well at the 4-H hippology contest (a quiz bowl on everything horse). But eventually the horse nerd discovered fantasy books that took over the bookshelves.

There are times that I think that maybe I do have a ranch house – ish aesthetic in my room. I have a nice patch work quilt on my wooden frame bunk bed (bunk house!). Our cowboy hats are hung all around the room along with the random halter or bridle that came in for repair. There is the occasional picture of a ranching scene that one of my sisters painted and almost always a pair of Wrangler jeans thrown over the chair, along with a stray Western Horseman Magazine. But it sorta clashes a bit with the retro vibe my sister has with her records hung on the wall and the teacups that I keep on the shelf by my bed to hold my jewelry (I will say the Dwight Yoakam and the Marty Robbins records pair well with the hats).

I think that if you were to assign my room an aesthetic, it would just be “ranch kid,” which is kinda like saying a ranch truck. It’s a little cluttered because you have to make sure you have all you need, but it’s functional. In my ranch kid room, there are all the random treasures that my sisters and I have collected over the years. There are remnants of past hobbies and toys that we haven’t quite let go of because there really doesn’t seem to be a need to. There are things that are mundane and annoyingly modern, but we need it to function in our everyday lives on the ranch, like the boxes of dewormer by my bed and the receipts and tax returns on my shelf. And then there are our collections of things that we add to with hopes of the future. If it’s books it’s not hoarding, but in reality, I hope that my crammed bookshelves turn into a library that my own little ranch kids can explore on rainy days. And I hope that my ever-expanding mug collection will be the cups that friends and family sip their make-it-home-awake coffee from on Saturday nights when everyone should have probably left two hours ago.

Maybe as a society we are too obsessed with fitting into a box even when we are being ourselves and breaking décor “rules.” Why do our living spaces have to give off a certain feeling when our living spaces are the stories of where we came from and where we are going? Our homes reflect the stories of our souls, and we don’t live long enough on this earth to inhabit sterile environments.