A lovely place to play...

Photo courtesy of PublicDomainPictures.net

An excerpt:

     The attic was a lovely place to play. The large, round, colored pumpkins made beautiful chairs and tables. The red peppers and the onions dangled overhead. The hams and the venison hung in their paper wrappings, and all the bunches of dried herbs, the spicy herbs for cooking and the bitter herbs for medicine, gave the place a dusty-spicy smell.

     Often the wind howled outside with a cold and lonesome sound. But in the attic Laura and Mary played house with the squashes and the pumpkins, and everything was snug and cosy.

~ from Little House in the Big Woods,

written by Laura Ingalls Wilder

When I was growing up, I, too, thought our attic was a lovely place to play. We did not store food in our attic, however. Ours was filled instead with boxes and bags of all sizes. Each one contained cast-off, long-forgotten items. I loved poking through them, looking for "treasure". My mom also kept her guitar in our attic. I spent many a day sitting next to our attic window, watching dust particles floating through the sunshine and strumming on that guitar, making up little songs to go with the tune.

I was in elementary school when I first read the Little House books. I remember reading the passage above and thinking that the sight and smell of all those foods would make an attic even more wonderful to play in. The image has stuck with me ever since. Does Laura and Mary's attic sound like a place you would like to play in?