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?).