Childhood Micronarrative

One memory from my childhood I always remember is playing dress up with my sisters. We kept a big basket in the downstairs of our house, with all sorts of dress up clothes in it. There were four of us, all girls, so we always had someone to play with. As I am the second oldest, I was lucky enough to have a baby sister to take care of and dress exactly how I wanted. Although sometimes we stayed in the house, I remember us all liking to go outside and make a house in the woods, under the trees.

One day stands out in my memory, although its possible we did this numerous times. I have a vague idea that this day was influenced by the Boxcar Children books. We were pretending to be orphans, and when lunch time came around, there was a nice lady that decided to welcome us into her home and give us food...(my mom, of course).

During our dress-up games, we always, no matter the weather, wore layers and layers of clothes; dresses, skirts, shirts, and of course shawls. The shawls were very important for some reason. We packed baskets of blankets and little trinkets to take with us outside. These were our only belongings in the game.

On our day of being orphans, I don’t even remember exactly what we did. I just remember sitting in our house under the trees, all dressed up, and probably very hot. I think the fun was in inventing the game, and getting ready for it.