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For some reason (perhaps because I was reading The Graveyard Book by Neil Gaiman which features an orphan) I started thinking about how my sister and I used to play a game I would loosely describe as "orphans". (The Boxcar Children--the coolest orphan-siblings around, of course--were very popular in our house.)
The point of the game, of course, was to pretend we had been orphaned and to then find/build shelter and forage for food. Neither of the two things were hard. Fort material was abundant considering that we had an-over-100-year-old, blown-down (tornado) stone barn shell in our front yard that the previous owners had made into kind of a junk yard (my dad also contributed, parking all sorts of things there--an old army jeep, a pedal-powered grinding wheel great for making poke-your-eye-out sticks, etc.), and we had 10 acres of hobby farm. In the summer we could build forts out of pallets or go to the pond and make houses in the marshy cattails; we could hole-up in the old army jeep or make a kitchen out of an old metal chicken hutch (with attendant sheet-metal table on top of a tractor tire rim).
Food wasn't hard either. We'd raid the garden, all the while pretending like someone was going to "catch" us--adding an extra layer of childish sneaking. There were peas, green beans, currants, cucumbers and--later in the season--tomatoes, apples, grapes and raw corn. We would take buds from the lilac and clover and columbines and suck the nectar out of the the ends of the flowers. We were feral little things, dashing from garden to tree to grass and setting up makeshift houses; our faces, hands, and clothes streaked with black, black mud. We would make hobo-stereotypical handkerchief and stick contraptions to throw over our shoulder and carry food.
I have to wonder what my mom thought of all this. She would have been home, hanging laundry or doing other mom stuff (she wasn't a *person* when I was that age, she was just mom). Through a window or outside she would have heard us, in the absolute height of melodrama (and with much sighing and swooning and gnashing), declare things like:
"Oh no! Our parents have DIED... What shall we do now? We shall STARVE if we don't find food!"
"Dead, dead, dead...our parents are dead!"
"Oh no, Missy, we simply shant see mom and dad EVER AGAIN."
"Woe!"
"Misery!"
"Dead! Our parents are dead!"
It was all very Dickensian.
The point of the game, of course, was to pretend we had been orphaned and to then find/build shelter and forage for food. Neither of the two things were hard. Fort material was abundant considering that we had an-over-100-year-old, blown-down (tornado) stone barn shell in our front yard that the previous owners had made into kind of a junk yard (my dad also contributed, parking all sorts of things there--an old army jeep, a pedal-powered grinding wheel great for making poke-your-eye-out sticks, etc.), and we had 10 acres of hobby farm. In the summer we could build forts out of pallets or go to the pond and make houses in the marshy cattails; we could hole-up in the old army jeep or make a kitchen out of an old metal chicken hutch (with attendant sheet-metal table on top of a tractor tire rim).
Food wasn't hard either. We'd raid the garden, all the while pretending like someone was going to "catch" us--adding an extra layer of childish sneaking. There were peas, green beans, currants, cucumbers and--later in the season--tomatoes, apples, grapes and raw corn. We would take buds from the lilac and clover and columbines and suck the nectar out of the the ends of the flowers. We were feral little things, dashing from garden to tree to grass and setting up makeshift houses; our faces, hands, and clothes streaked with black, black mud. We would make hobo-stereotypical handkerchief and stick contraptions to throw over our shoulder and carry food.
I have to wonder what my mom thought of all this. She would have been home, hanging laundry or doing other mom stuff (she wasn't a *person* when I was that age, she was just mom). Through a window or outside she would have heard us, in the absolute height of melodrama (and with much sighing and swooning and gnashing), declare things like:
"Oh no! Our parents have DIED... What shall we do now? We shall STARVE if we don't find food!"
"Dead, dead, dead...our parents are dead!"
"Oh no, Missy, we simply shant see mom and dad EVER AGAIN."
"Woe!"
"Misery!"
"Dead! Our parents are dead!"
It was all very Dickensian.
