The play's the thing

When I was a child I kept imaginary horses, no more than three at a time. 

Any more than three and the time investment was too hefty and I couldn’t keep track of everybody. I had one white Arabian mare, who was the most stalwart of all the horses, and it is a great sadness that I cannot remember her name. I remember deliberating over her name; it needed to be graceful and romantic. Genevieve or Tara maybe.  Gwendolyn.

I usually also kept two young black horses, faster than my Arabian mare, but feisty and harder to handle. They probably had names like Black Diamond or Velvet. These horses would run behind my father’s car when we went on road trips, which offered me a sense of comfort, that something awesome of mine was also coming with us.

I kept the horses in the garage, in small transparent stalls between my mother’s gardening supplies and my father’s motorboat. These are full size horses, mind you; somehow they all managed to fit in that space. But someone was always moving the wheelbarrow in the way of my horse system. Writing this right now, I can hear the scrape of the wheelbarrow as I moved it aside to get through to my horses.

While I was going through this horse period (before I started taking riding lessons on visible horses), I could be found every morning opening up the garage door, then walking calmly with my two hands in the air, leading two horses at once out to the front yard. This yard was most conveniently fenced in electric and had a nice gate, and I was satisfied that my horses were content and healthy there. In the evening, the reverse happened: hands in the air, leading horses back to the safety of the garage. I would usually also ride in the evening too, trying to get my sister to join me. Then we would slap our thighs with a thin stick and prance and run around the driveway.

Now this was just my imaginary horses. I could write likewise about the town of Lego people and dry beans we had (“Beanville”), or the extensive village of rocks by the lake where we made seaweed cakes to sell (we were enamored with the suffix “-ville”, apparently, so this was “Rockville”), the American girl dolls and the living room carpet floods they survived in their laundry basket lifeboats, the plastic horses and their world travels chosen by spinning the globe with eyes closed and a finger poked down, the huge families of barbies and their dramas and infidelities and love lives, or the space ships on the couch manned by an expert crew of beanie babies.

I would play tirelessly, endlessly, with no thought of hunger or time or the importance of setting the table. There are no words to describe how delicious this was, one of those incredibly satisfying drives that needs to be expressed as a young human. I can say with utmost clarity that my boundless opportunity to be allowed to create my own worlds of play was the greatest benefit of homeschooling.

My first greatest heartbreak came when my younger sister sat by the beanie babies in their spaceship and called me over (I was worlds away with a book on the couch), “Let’s play! Come on!”  And I couldn’t.  I couldn’t play.  It no longer felt “true” to craft the imaginary stories and take the figures in my hands and move them across the couch.  I was surprised and sad and felt that something was wrong with me, that I couldn’t muster this anymore. But I was taken away by someone else’s story now, the books, and I had less of a need to craft my own stories. And I was putting my energy towards horse riding lessons, planning for horse shows, getting excited about systems that were outside of my head.

What is play, really? Can adults play? What is different between adult play and child play?

I think play is where importance and whimsy meet. As a child, it is critical and necessary of energy that your horses survive the tsunami on the carpet—there’s the importance—but also whimsical and safe. For instance, at any time you could stop the game or Daddy comes home after work all comfort and safety, and these things are the foundation of feeling not actually in danger, of not actually being in a tsunami.

I think play is also about creating something from within yourself. As a child, it’s writing an intricate story about your barbies or caring for your imaginary horses. As an adult, on good days, this can come from making music on the pipe organ or finding just the apt word to describe an experience. In a much broader sense, I suppose all of life can be playful, provided you’re in a period when things are not troubling, and where living, and being aware of living, the intricate story of a human experience comes as self expression.

As an adult I feel that sense of time stopping, about something being important and whimsical when I’m crafting in my kitchen, for instance. Not following a recipe, which would be just plain adult, but puzzling over what’s in my fridge and then imagining up something to create from it. What about curry powder and chocolate! On soy nuts? Yes! It’s whimsical because of the strange combinations, a little bit of self expression. And it’s important because this is taking care of my health and well-being.

A sense of play happened during field work the other day. Monsieur Visiting French Scholar, who is a wonderful combination of analytically brilliant and very silly, and I were working in neighboring plots of cover crops. The setting: something important (we’re doing science) but also whimsical, because as I’m bent over I feel a light tap on my butt. Looking up I see Mr Scholar grinning ghoulishly from his plot and that he had excellent aim with a grass weed arrow he had flown at my butt (root ball acting as weighted arrowhead, stems serving as feathered shaft). We laughed and of course there was no danger in any of this. Later I found him bent over, curve of lower back exposed, and so I planted a dandelion down the back of his pants.  The basal rosette of the plant popped perkily from that place, a novel flower pot design.

I believe that without the setting of importance (we were all out there being productive and scientific), there would be less of a life spark to beget creativity and see grass weeds as arrows and behinds as flower pots.

Let me describe for you a scene of play that is not of a child, that happened recently, and that brought happiness and whimsy mixed with that sense of drive and importance. If you told my ten year old self that this would bring me so such giddy glee, I would have disbelieved you indeed. 

I went grocery shopping with a friend.

The farm store was mostly empty that evening and my sweet friend Tall Bri (“lets be tall happy dancing woman together!” we’ll say before a Friday night) and I gathered carts and rolled into the dreamy land of local, minimally-packaged, and impossibly inexpensive food. You don’t get prices like this in Wegmans or at the Ithaca coop. It takes a Mennonite Grocery Shop in the small town of Seneca Falls.

“Jams!” Tall Bri crowed, “cheese!” I called, and we giddily rolled into the separate lands. For me this was a jubilant unfettered conquering of good food, where I didn’t have to sigh wearily about how expensive fresh ground peanut butter was, and where I could buy a simple plastic bag with walnuts in it, not some glossy colored cardboard-plastic-structured container with a small essay of labeling on it.  I bought two containers of peanut butter, a giant glugging pillar each, with that self-satisfied understanding of I’m Stocking Up For the Future While The Gettin’s Good.  “The Asparagus is so CHEAP!” I could hear Tall Bri from the land of fresh vegetables. I hooked my right foot up into my cart and skate-boarded gleefully to join her. Grapefruits and apples and eggplant, again, the cornucopia of plenty.

Rolling along, admiring left and right down every aisle, as if in Disney Land, simply so pleased by everything. Blue AND red popcorn, just because they both existed, went into my cart. I saw Tall Bri’s head skimming along a few aisles over. “I found the nuts!” she sang and, in a pang of leaving the many varieties of bulk flour I was studying, I rolled to join her with the pecans. The pang of leaving something good for something else good cannot actually be a pang, it is in fact a celebration.

We had the dose of importance from the nature of buying food for oneself and the dose of whimsical because the food was so simple and pleasing and local and nearly half the price of things at Wegmans.

A Mennonite grocery store offers not only a highly economical shopping experience but a cultural one as well, the products that you don’t find in your middle America grocery store.  For instance, I bought a LOG of butter. “Amish butter roll” said its name tag. I passed a bag of breakfast cereal the size of a small child, disconcertingly pastel circles and squares and stars made from wheat and corn syrup, whimsical indeed, “Happy Shapes” it read on the bag, by a company called comfortingly “Hospitality”.

The manufacturer of cheese curds, some tiny brand that was local to upstate NY, Stoltzfus Dairy Cheese.  Stoltzfus. Of course I took a packet home, just to enjoy that sneeze name each time I opened my fridge. 

Two women in blue and green dresses, white aprons, and little bonnets rang us up. I just about pranced each item onto the belt and fluttered with urgency to deploy my battalion of reusable bags for the haul. “I’m so excited about these spices!” I said as I topped the 8^th container on the stack I was creating; it shuttered its way balanced on the belt toward Miss Bonnet Cashier. She was totally unfazed by my giddy enthusiasm and with complete composure scanned each item for me. The sum came to more than I have ever spent on groceries in one swipe, but with that much peanut butter and popcorn and maple syrup I won’t step into a florescent grocery store for anything besides soy milk for months.

Whatever it may be, grocery shopping or goofing around in the field, I never want to lose that whimsical importance I used to feel leading my imaginary horses to the front yard.