Prisoner’s Fancy

Do I have to go to bed, do I have to, do I have to?

And of course I do, even though undiluted summer is streaming through my window with its heavy perfume of honeysuckle and ripe peaches. The grass is still leaping upward all across our back yard. The flowers are still awake, all color and careless joy like children, and daylight is still blazing trails through our giant pecan trees. Just beyond that door, the bright and busy mechanism of life is humming Come play! Come play!

But I am prisoner in my pink-and-white bed. Stuck until morning, no hope of escape.

I lie quietly, indignant and imaginative, listening to the cicadas playing tag. There go the bumblebees too, pedaling their bikes around the neighborhood, and butterflies cheering each other down the Slip ‘N’ Slide. The chickadees, of course, are playing hide and seek, and suddenly, I am with them, perched on the rafter of an old barn.

There are no rules in Chickadee Hide & Seek. Just a lot of swooping and soaring, little feathered torpedoes zipping around cows and alighting like bobble-heads on a power line, our own trampoline of copper filaments and sky. I remember to bring my teddy bears—Fred and Katie, who are married but have not yet learned the juicy details of procreation—and we fly together, impossibly high. We hide inside chimney-tops and behind clouds, where Fred and Katie get carried away kissing (no tongue, though). My little brothers would never be able to find me in a million years; I am thrilled.

The scenery shifts, and I am Bride Barbie. Katie refuses to lend her teddy-bear husband to me for the occasion, but who needs a groom anyway? My long white gown is studded with diamond drops and teensy pink pearls. And draped with satin. And fringed with rubies. And covered with lace. And festooned with ribbons. And plated with gold. I am breathtakingly grown up, even if the only ones who see it are my woodland creature audience, come to watch me twirl and twirl until my veil is tangled in pine branches.

I live in my own stories for hours until I finally grow tired and drift to sleep somewhere in the South Pacific. But the next night, I am back. This time, my bears and I must escape a dismal orphanage, and the night after that, we take a tire swing up, up into space. My stories overlap and twist into complicated candycanes, yarn and fancy fraying together into fantastic landscapes. And night after long childhood night, I weave gossamer threads of imagination into a new home for myself, a place to retreat for those lonely times when summer is locked out of reach.