30-Week Blog Challenge Week 28: A Place You Love

I'm back with the Monday blog challenge! The lady in charge is Marie at Mom Gets Real. The questions are right here:

QUESTIONS

And Week 28's prompt is . . .

A PLACE YOU LOVE!

To be honest I mostly just adore being home, comfortable in front of my computer working on a book or lying around reading. But I guess that's kind of a boring answer!

One place I really loved sort of recently was the vacation house my friends and I rented for a trip to Anna Maria Island.

As you can see from the photo, there are multiple decks where a person can chill (or, more accurately in the Florida heat, bake), and I loved hanging out on one of those balconies just sitting around reading and enjoying the view.

There was a really great pool, too. I'm not huge on swimming but I like hanging out by the pool and watching other people have fun. Well, or reading.

And it had a nice big dining area where my friends and I had wonderful meals every night, like homemade pizza and barbecue!

I had a great time going there with my friends, and I think I would love it even more now that I have a laptop and can do Internet Things without difficulty. Not being able to do my Internet Things causes me some anxiety you see.

And if I may be nostalgic and add another place I love, I have peculiarly fond memories of my maternal grandparents' house, where my mom grew up in New Jersey.

That was the best house ever. My mother was one of eight children, so the space was kind of used, uh, creatively, and there were even a couple bedrooms in the basement, along with a pool table! My grandmother always had a big box of toys for visiting kidlets to play with, and they had a piano.

My grandparents had a front yard with a hill where we could roll down in the mild months and frolic in the snow during winter vacations. And sometimes, since visits often coincided with holidays (of course), we would get to participate in their holiday celebrations there, which meant A CHRISTMAS TREE. (We didn't celebrate Christmas, so obviously this was a novelty.)

There was lots of cookie-making and wandering around to talk to relatives and noise and, as I got older, cousins to play with. My mom sometimes talks about how much she misses having family around all the time, and though I think that sounds like a nightmare for everyday living, I get a sense of what she misses when I remember what it was like at that house. There was just something about it. And we can't have it anymore because my grandparents are gone and the house was sold and we don't have family gatherings anymore.

It was definitely a magic place.