The other night, I had a headache. My worst one in awhile. Trying to hold off on medication for as long as humanly possible (I have this weird fear of damaging my liver) I decided to distract myself with a movie. I randomly stumbled upon Bridge to Terabithia. Remembering how much I loved the book as a kid (but remembering very little about the actual story), I turned it on. And it all came flooding back. All of the reasons I fell in love with it.
Long story short, a preteen boy with a difficult family life befriends his new neighbor, a girl with a vivid imagination and passion for living. Together, they find a rope swing hanging over a creek in the woods, and create an imaginary world called Terabithia with the creek acting as a sort of portal into it. (Side note: The setting is supposed to be Virginia, but I guess the movie was actually filmed in New Zealand for whatever reason. But it makes for stunning scenery that adds overwhelming beauty. Makes me want to go!) The story takes a tragic turn on several different levels, and is truly a masterpiece. I encourage you all to watch it (it's on Youtube) because I believe that adults have so much to learn from such a story.
I swear I'm not getting paid to promote this movie. But it really had me thinking back to my imagination as a kid. In fact, make-believe fueled the majority of my childhood fun.
Although I am obviously quite young, I feel like I still grew up before the majority of today's major technologies took off. Kids didn't have cell phones when I was little. Black and white Gameboys and N64 were essentially the only major video game systems. We didn't have a single computer in the house until I was in junior high school. The June I turned six, our television broke. Rather than go buy a new one, my parents decided that this would be the "Summer of No TV" in the Papapietro household. I only cared for the first few mornings when I couldn't get my Sesame Street or Winnie the Pooh fix (no Disney Channel for us back then). After that very quick adjustment, I honestly forgot about it. Looking back, I'm glad I didn't have these distractions; the neighborhood kids and I made our own fun.
Bikes often played a huge role in this fun. When I was ten and my next-door neighbor was twelve, our parents decided that we were at an acceptable age to start riding our bikes around our very small neighborhood unsupervised (provided of course that we stuck together and told them where we were going). This opened up a whole new world for us. We could explore.
On one of these early biking days, Erin and I came across a mysterious dirt road off of one of the neighborhood streets. We had never seen it when we were walking with our families; it quite literally almost seemed to have appeared out of thin air. It was like a different world, maybe something out of the Wizard of Oz. A few small cottages with green thatched rooves dotted the woodsy road. Erin and I concluded that witches lived in these strange houses. We proceeded to venture back daily for a few weeks, leaving small rocks as "traps" in the middle of the street. If the rock was even slightly turned or moved upon our return, we assumed that a witch did it. Case closed. This wasn't the only mysterious new path we came across. We also discovered one a few doors down from my house that led straight to the nearby farm. (Although we stopped using this path when the two reclusive teenage boys down the street condescendingly offered us pot in the woods one afternoon. To which I replied, "Oh, a pot? What are you cooking?").
My cousins and I utilized a similar "trapping" tactic whenever they visited. Kara, Julie and I were downright convinced that a secret underground network of robbers existed underneath my house. Naturally. (This may have stemmed from my love of Nancy Drew books). How did we catch those robbers? By leaving quarters, dimes, nickels and pennies on my bedroom floor! What robber could resist fifty-seven cents in change? We would then hide in the closet and wait for the robber to walk into our midst. A coin was missing? We proved the robber's existence! Years later, my cousins and I jokingly confessed to moving the coins various times when the others weren't looking. We really wanted to keep our game going, and our imaginations alive. That was the point of it all, anyway.
 |
| We dressed like princesses, too. |
And then, there was the clubhouse. The summer before kindergarten, my dad built my brother and I a clubhouse in a small clearing in our backyard. This clubhouse saw years of pattering feet and splattered Freeze-Pops. It transformed from a pirate ship to a jungle fortress to a mountaintop. It served as "base" for countless games of tag, as we shimmed up the ladder to escape our pursuer.
Over time, the wood darkened. Our growing limbs made scurrying up the narrow ladder increasingly difficult. Our bums no longer fit in the tiny wooden treehouse chairs. I would soon grow as tall as the clubhouse itself, my forehead touching the raised floor if I was standing on the ground beside it. This changed my perspective both literally and figuratively. But the clubhouse still stood.
Until one day when I was fourteen.
On this particular early summer afternoon, Joey and one of his friends were playing in the clubhouse; at six, it still loomed in their eyes. Joey got up from a clubhouse chair and walked across the floor. CRACK. One second, Joey was standing tall. The next, he was crumpled on the ground under the treehouse, staring up at the sky through a hole about as wide as his tiny body.
This whole story is actually amusing, because besides a small scrape, Joey was not hurt. The clubhouse saw far more damage than he did. But what followed was less than funny.
As I stepped onto the back porch after coming off the bus the next afternoon, I noticed something immediately. I let out a gasp.
The treehouse was gone.
I knew immediately what had happened. I sprinted up the stairs, calmly closed my bedroom door, and started to cry. Small, heaving sobs. At fourteen, I was surprised by my reaction. I hadn't spent a substantial amount of time in the clubhouse in at least two years. Why did I care so deeply?
After about fifteen minutes, I composed myself and went down to the kitchen, where my parents had been sitting. I unsuccessfully tried to hide the fact that I had been crying moments before (though my eyes were bloodshot and still brimming with tears) while I asked them where the treehouse was.
My dad spoke first. "I had to take it down, Maria. It was becoming too old and dangerous for everyone."
I lost it again. "But. we. could. have. saveddddddd itttttt!!!!!"
Looking back, it wasn't so much the clubhouse that had me so upset. The dismantling of the clubhouse only symbolized a period of drastic transition that I was already a part of. I would be starting high school in the fall. I was spending less time outside running around and exploring. Why did everything have to change? Why did so many parts of my childhood have to go? (The swing set also broke that summer). Why was everyone becoming less interested in make-believe?
I wonder....at what age does imagination take the back seat?
Or does it? I read constantly, and reading takes me to another world. I may not explore the neighborhood woods with the awe that filled my seven-year-old heart during such pursuits, but exploring the streets of medieval Italian hill towns certainly had a similar effect. Imagination does not have to end. It just goes through a period of transformation.
But on the eve of a year of major transitions and decision-making, I sometimes find myself longing for my clubhouse, searching for my own "Terabithia."
