There I am, in my back yard, my head full of more stories and imaginings than anyone will ever know. I keep most of them to myself, as I am quickly approaching the advanced age of 10, in uh, two years. But my imagination is teaming with possibilities. Even at that young age my Ideation strength runs untamed. You’re here too! You’ve come to play. Isn’t that nice? We don’t have to worry about being all formal, or standing on ceremony by calling to set up an appointed time to make sure we are free for a play date? No, at this age, all we have to do is just walk down the street and ask if the other can come out to play. So simple.
What will we play? All right, house it is! But only if I get to be the oldest sister! Being the oldest grants me the right to have a job, and a car. Who do you want to be, the mother? No? Ok, we can just say the mom and dad are out of town, which means I'm in charge! You can be the baby; I’ll take care of you! Or you can be my best friend; we can do all kinds of fun things, like work together, and go out to eat! Lets go get the dress up box, as working teenagers we have to dress in the highest fashions! I’ll wear the blue dress, if I tie this sash around the waist like this you’ll never know it was torn. Do you like this hat? Ok, now we’re ready. Yeah, your right, I’m bored with this. What should we do now? We could go outside and play on the swing set! We can pretend the platform above the slide is the Dawn Treader, from Narnia, and that we’re sailing across the seas! Hi-ho! A storm is upon us! Oh good, it’s past, all is well.
What should we do now? Do you want to be spies? I can go get my walki-talkies. Ok, your code name is “Alfa Charlie”. If you need me, use the button to send two short beeps and one long. If you get in trouble make the beeps send S.O.S. got it? And don’t get caught! I’ll take the front yard, you take the back. Lets go.
Ok, well, I guess your right, there's really not anyone to spy on. What should we play now? A fort? Yeah, that’s a great idea! Lets go get some sheets and blankets from inside. And guess what! I saw a cardboard box out on the curb down the street, someone must have bought a refrigerator! That’ll be perfect for our fort! We’ll also need markers, we can draw a space ship control panel on the inside of the box, and some scissors, to because out a door. Hey! Lets make one side a space ship, and the other a castle! We can cut out the door to work like a drawbridge.
Well, it’s getting dark out; I think it’s time for dinner. Thanks for coming over though! Maybe tomorrow I can come over to your house and we can play in your imagination.
Oook, welcome back to present day. I hope you had fun playing! I know I did :-) those were some of my favorite things to play growing up. The reason I took you along on that little adventure of adventures, was to remind you of how much fun being a kid can be, and how many good things we get to do at that age that we forget about when we “grow up”. All of a sudden we have to be level headed, and doing impractical things like building forts and playing spies is nothing but silliness and we must be more refined then that. Yes, there comes a point when we just have to grow up…or do we?
Ok, get ready, our adventures aren’t over yet! Now, if you’re not in your twenty something’s, you’ll have to imagine you are (this is where you already twenty something’s have it easy) this time, instead of a back yard, we’re at an apartment complex, with 44 students living in four of the surrounding buildings. Between the buildings there's a nice open lawn, directly in the sunshine all day. You and I are in one of the apartments over looking the lawn, below we can see several students gathering with study material, the laughter and conversation drifts up through our window. Before you know it, we hear a knock at the door, (not just any knock! It’s the secret knock, the person on the outside has knocked five times fast, and they are waiting for us to knock the two times back and let them in). After answering the knock we find a fellow student standing on our doorstep “reading party outside, wanna come?” (do you hear the whispers of years past come back, remember when we were 8, and you came to ask if I could play outside?)
We gather on the lawn, someone brings a guitar. We throw things at the apartments above us, calling for people to come join. We stay out in the sunshine till it falls behind the mountains. Playing the day away.
Now it’s a new day, Alise has posted on Facebook that her apartment is hosting a fort party! “Bring your sheets and blankets”. 
I, along with Briana, visit each apartment, gathering everyone's extra sheets. Katelyn kindly offers the use of Alyssa’s sheets, since she’s out of town this weekend anyways. Bri and I help Alise and Jenny tack the sheets to the ceiling and walls to build a canopy around their living room. We even put the kitchen table in the hallway, so that you have to crawl under it to enter the fort. 
Soon many more students arrive and we put in a movie. Later, after the movie is done, some of us linger and decide we might as well stay the night. Jenny serenades us on her guitar as we slumber.
Now again, a few days later. My life long, impossible childhood dream is about to come true! And you get to witness it! Come with me and look out my balcony window, you see that apartment right across the lawn? Well, also on the third story are some wonderful girls, and all semester I have been wanting to try out a tin can telephone strung from my balcony to theirs, and tonight, by golly, we’re gonna do it! Ok, first I’m going to set up my line, I’ll pop the hole in the cans, string my yarn through one of them and tie the knot. All right, now, just secure the can to the balcony rail like this, good. Now I’m going to drop my ball of yarn and we’ll go out and get it and bring it over to under their apartment. Ok, Ciera’s up there with some yarn of her own, just tell her to let it down and we’ll tie my ball of yarn to her string and she can hoist it up! Now, just to secure the other can, and, perfect! Ok, wait here while I run back and we’ll test it!
"Hello?”
“HI!”
“It works!”
“Haha, this is wonderful!”
“I’m so glad!”
“Me too!”
“Ok, goodbye now!”
“Bye, love you!”
Yes! It works perfectly! My childhood dreams have become a little less impossibler.
Well, you may not believe it, but we did have “play dates” under the guise of studying out on the lawn, and we did actually make a fort in an apartment and sleep in it. And oooh yes indeed! We did make a tin can telephone spanning from their apartment to mine, and yes siree, it worked just fine (except we had to call each other on our cell phones in order to let each other know we wanted to talk on the tin can, eh, minor details). And, the guys below us may or may not have threatened to tap our line, and in fact Chris and Andrew may or may not have succeeded in tapping said line (turns out, tin can phones can work three ways!). So, despite popular demand, child’s play is not just for children.
My time at FLI encouraged me to be who I am, and so much of the time who I am is nothing more than a child’s imagination in a young woman's body. It was wonderful to be free to express that inner child during my time in Colorado, and to be surrounded by people who not only accepted and encouraged that imagination, but used their own childlike imaginations as well.
I'm sorry if this is a random post, right now as I'm writing this it's actually after three in the morning, and it really just started out as a bumbling to fulfill a late night writing craving. But as I went, I kept finding more and more parallels between the free and easy play of a child, and the refreshing and accepting community of FLI, where I was able to do the impossibler.
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