A while back, I encountered an excerpt from a book of magic by the Chilean mystic/movie director Alejandro Jodorowsky: a cure for homesickness. Acquire a box of dirt from your homeland, and regularly sit in a comfy chair with one’s bare feet resting in this dirt.
It sounds at once goofy and exceedingly obvious, at least if you look at the world through a magical lens.
I keep on thinking about that spell as I go around my apartment, putting things in boxes. Because a while back I acquired a whole bunch of Mardi Gras doubloons from my hometown of New Orleans, and scattered them about the floor of my living room and bedroom to create a cartoony sort of “dragon’s lair” ambience. And now and then I would stand barefoot in them, wiggle my toes, and feel really good about doing this. I chalked that up to the mostly-joking “I am a dragon!” thing I have going on in my life; of course dragons feel good when they’re wallowing in their hoards, right? But maybe I was just doing an unwitting variation on that homesickness spell.
I keep on thinking about this because, while most of the doubloons are packed into a few small boxes, I keep finding more of them hidden under things as I work on going through everything I own and either packing it up or selling/giving away/donating/trashing it.
Of course, vampires need to rest upon a bed of native earth in their coffins.