Childhood Play

When I was a child, my sister and I would spend hours playing “Little House on the Prairie.” We would recreate scenes from the books that we loved and imagine what it was like to survive with only what we could grow or forage from the land. We imagined tending to our livestock (our dogs), and toted water from our well (our outdoor spigot) to our barn (a pile of sticks arranged in the footprint of a barn). Some of our favorite days were those rare Maryland snowstorms when we could put on our snow gear and tromp around imagining how hard we were working to save our farm animals from the extreme weather.