imagination
I love it when I have a brief flash of a game or something I used to do as a child. I was just hanging out my washing, and as I shook out the fitted sheet and hung it on the line, with the fabric billowing around the elastic in the breeze, I remembered how I used to love playing amongst the hanging laundry with my dolls. I would put them in the puffed out pocket of the fitted sheets and pretend they lived in the clouds.
Another game I had, when we lived in Papua New Guinea, was to imagine living on the ceiling. We had a coffee table with a mirror inlaid into it, and I would look into this mirror of an upside down world, where the lights all stood up from the ground like plants on straight stalks, and everything was white and minimalist. I would try to catch a glimpse of people who lived in this ceiling world, who were just out of the sightline of my mirror portal.
I love hearing stories of my friends’ children and the games and fictions they spin. It’s so delightful seeing the world through the eyes of a four year old, where bears hanging around outside your house is a perfectly plausible prospect, where you can be a magician if you decide to be, where the most ordinary objects hold some kind of immense untapped power.
I’d like to get back a bit of that imagination somehow. I know it’s still there in me, just need to crack through the sugar shell and release the creamy goodness inside (can you tell I want a creme brulee?).
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I used to play in the laundry with my barbie dolls. I’d tie them to the tap and twist and twist the rope then swing them from one side of the basin to the other, watching them as they twirled. I would pretend they were trapeze artists and that I was the circus conductor (or whatever it’s called). lol.