Imaginary Friends

When I was in third grade my parents banned us from playing the computer or watching television on school nights. I have always been grateful that they did. (My husband already knows that when we have kids we will have the same rule.) During the summer we were limited to an hour a day so we had to find other activities to pass the time.

One of my favorite books is The Outlaws of Sherwood by Robin McKinley. So one day my friends and I decided to reenact the story. Our back yard wasn’t very big but we had a large silver maple and an apple tree that were great to climb. Because my brother and I were the only ones that read it we told everyone else what happened and what characters there were. We spent hours fighting each other with apple branches in the back yard and honing our “fencing” skills. A lot of bloody knuckles and bruised fingers occurred but since none of us were really trying to hurt the other person we didn’t care. When we got tired of that story we would make up our own stories to play, normally involving dragons of some kind. Soon we were playing the make believe at everyone’s houses. One of the houses was having the basement finished so we pretended the studs for the walls were prison cells. Our bikes became our horses as we would race up and down the street. We probably got a lot of strange looks from the neighbors because my front yard was normally a desert that we were crawling through begging for water.

When I changed elementary schools I also changed schedules so I had a lot of free time on my hands. I decided that I could make my own stories and enact them. I had three years of spending time by myself and playing stories through my head. I would spend hours in the backyard by myself running around seeing my own story play out how I wanted it to. I guess there is little wonder why I wanted to become an author. With all the stories still running through my head, it is a little more difficult to act them out so now I content myself with writing them down although it isn’t nearly as fun.