May 22, 2016

Busy

I was a very busy little person. 

My imagination was my favorite toy as a child. I pretended pretty much everyday until I was twelve-ish. I thought it would be fun to write a post about the things I would pretend when I was little. It should (probably) be a funny read, and also a place to write things down that I might not remember when I'm old. 

When I was really little, my older brother (Matthew) and my little brother (Mark) would play cats. Matthew was our owner, I would be a tabby, and Mark would be a persian cat. He ate marshmallows. Another time, we three would be mice who tormented the mean (human) aunt who came to live at the house. We were some clever rodents. 

When I got older, I sometimes passed the day saving civil war soldiers as they suffered gangrene and scarlet fever. This particular game I played with one particular friend (most of my games had a specific playmate), and each time we did it, we ended up getting sick ourselves (but recovered after an extremely dire case) or marrying one of the soldiers, or both. 

Other days, I would content myself by being a squirrel (named Blossom, most of the time), who lived in our walnut tree with her little brother (who happened to be my little brother), named Bud. We would gather food to store for winter, make food, and eat food. We had one track minds. There might have been the trauma of a hunter invading our neck of the woods, but most of the time we climbed in and out of our tree house, carrying wild onions, dandelions, random leaves, and flowers to be hung upside down or stored in flower pots. 

Oh, and there were many (many, many) times I would get together with one particular friend (or two others who shared my love for this game) and play...orphans. The Wilhelm house has been an orphanage countless times, each one ruled by a cruel orphan-mistress, who beat us, made us clean through the night, and only provided us with scratchy cots and thin blankets. I'm not sure why every mistress had to be unbearably awful, but I guess it gave us opportunities to be patient martyrs of orphans. 

I was sometimes a tiny person, who rode ants and whose country was at war (it was always at war). My friend was my mother. My father had usually died years ago (so we didn't have to worry about playing him), and I usually had a couple younger siblings. My pretend mother participated in some sort of ladies aid thing, I was either terrible or amazing in school, and we owned a store at the front of our house. 

I was a nurse, a squirrel (or a mouse. That happened a lot, too), a poor orphan, or a patriotic person the size of a bread crumb. I was busy.