Winter Projects
At five years old I didn’t have too many winter projects yet, as a matter of fact I had none. With Adirondack winters lasting some six months or more not having any winter projects made those long cold days indoors very long. My mother had her books, my father his snowshoes to mend, and my sister homework and paper dolls. Since my reading skills were still forming and Snowshoes were still to large to wear, and paper dolls were definitely out, I was stuck without a project.
As luck would have it I was a creative child and I seemed to find lots of Things in the house that I would pretend were other things entirely. I made kitchen chairs into a fort house with old blankets. These same chairs became seats in a school bus where I picked up imaginary passengers, usually stuffed animals. An old cardboard box became a racecar, a spaceship, or a boat that brought me on crazy journeys.
My family must have thought I had lost my marbles when I explained what these pretend items had transformed into. I can still hear my mother say, “Oh that’s nice, was it an easy trip?”. Without knowing it I had a project and that project was pretend. I made days and weeks creating new themes of pretend. My sister and I built a grocery store and sold each other funny items that pretended to be food. The knobs of my bed post were apples and a bunch of old yarn was spaghetti. We used the old brown paper bags saved from a real shopping trip and filled them with the oddest assortment of pretend foods.
My sister’s favorite pretend scenario was school. I had not been to school yet so I let her take the lead. I practiced my name by drawing the letters on faded construction paper in our laundry room. But most times I did the pretend of something on my own. I would talk to myself and invent voices and characters for those other folks I thought should be part of the game. Floating down a pretend river in the American West “Our hall floor” in a birch bark canoe “A cardboard banana box” protecting the settlers with me from roving Indians on the shore with my Winchester rifle “ A yellow Wiffle ball bat”.
God forbid our cat Blackie should show up during one of these pretend missions and fall prey to my shooting skills as a desperate mountain lion trying to sack the children we were taking west. I hopped out and made chase of the wild beast shouting a rapid succession of pow pow noises. Then my mother saying “That’s not nice, I think this ends your trip.”
