A World of Pure Imagination

Hello everyone out there in Blogland. It’s been a while since we’ve gotten together. I’ve been working a real (though mercifully temporary) job and I’ve noticed that working full time takes a huge chunk out of my day. So keeping up with my blog has fallen by the wayside. I apologize and promise to do better going forward.

My job is kind of boring and I often find myself daydreaming, something I used to do a lot when I was in school. I was always called on when my body was in Mrs. Ponder’s sixth grade class, but my mind was a million miles away (most likely on the bridge of the Starship Enterprise).

I spent a lot of my childhood using my imagination, sometimes to escape the drudgery of sitting in a class listening to my classmates read our dry science book text and often with the kids in the neighborhood when we’d all gather in someone’s backyard and somebody would say “Let’s pretend we’re….” and we’d take it from there.

I was recently reminded of those days while running through a nearby housing development. I noticed on the side of the road an indentation in the ground surrounded by a one foot wall of dirt. Sticks and branches had been stuck in the wall along with mussel shells and rocks.

It was a fort, built by a group of kids.

I remember building forts like that. Digging in the ground, shaping the walls, gathering the sticks and rocks to adorn our structure. There were no grown-ups supervising us, it was all our own creation.

I’ve been thinking about those kids who built the fort. I hope when they finished, one of them said “Let’s pretend we’ve gone back in time and we’re fighting dinosaurs,” or “Let’s pretend aliens have landed and taken over the world,” or “Let’s pretend we’re being attacked by zombies.”

I hear a lot of grumbling from people my age how kids today don’t know how to use their imaginations. They spend their childhoods holed up in their rooms absorbed in their Playstation games or texting their friends on their smart phones.

The fort in the Anchor’s Bend development has given me hope for the future. There are still kids who go out side, get dirty building forts and start sentences with “Let’s pretend..”

Those are the kids who become writers.

Judy Nichols is the author of several mysteries available on Amazon.