There was a time when kids could leave the house in the morning with no real plan and somehow come home with a story.
Not a photo. Not a social media post. A story.
Reading the chapters about Wendi and Holly in Word
Puddles: My Life in Snippets felt like stepping back into that kind of
childhood.
Katherine and her friends didn't need entertainment handed
to them. They created it. One day they were walking railroad tracks, balancing
high above the ground without giving much thought to what would happen if a
train actually showed up. Another day they were carrying kittens around in
bicycle baskets as if they were chauffeuring royalty through the neighborhood.
Somewhere along the way they decided to invent a religion, partly because they
liked the sound of the words and partly because childhood logic doesn't require
much explanation.
The thing is, none of those stories feel exaggerated. They
feel exactly like the sort of things kids do when imagination is stronger than
caution.
My favorite detail might be the invisible shoes.
After cutting their feet while wandering through alleys,
Katherine came up with a solution. Not actual shoes. Invisible shoes. Problem
solved. At least according to the minds of children. It's the kind of memory
that makes perfect sense when you're ten and absolutely none when you're
seventy.
Then there was Holly, who helped create a secret world
called Owedd. It had its own language, its own rules, and even its own song
about Mexican African Beans. Reading those pages, I found myself laughing not
because the ideas were ridiculous, but because they were so familiar. Kids
everywhere create entire worlds out of nothing. Most of us just forget about
them when we grow up.
What makes these stories special isn't the mischief or the
humor, though there's plenty of both. It's the feeling that runs underneath
them. The sense that childhood wasn't happening in the background while
everyone waited for real life to begin.
It was real life. Messy, funny, imaginative.