An Odd Child

Now, I'm the first to admit that I was an odd child, blessed - or cursed - with a vivid imagination, and unhindered by many social norms. I mean, I knew better than to abandon all conventional norms in public, but alone just about anything flew.

Growing up, one of my favorite board games was Uncle Wiggily - based on the children stories dating back to 1910 - which I played with my friend, Connie, or simply by myself.

I'm not exactly sure anymore what the objective of the game was, but I remember I loved the player pieces.

To me they always looked far less like arthritic old rabbits, than like four of the ugliest women I had ever seen. And thus off of the board game and the oppressive restrictions of Milton Bradley's rules that's whom they became: The Four Wiggily Sisters. They were my own personal one-and-a-half inch action figures out for adventure.

Now, I recognize that the above is unusual enough, but gentle reader, it does get stranger.

I had just read Rikki Tikki Tavi, the adventures of a young boy as seen through the eyes of his protective mongoose.

Thanks to Rudyard Kipling, my Four Wiggily Sisters ended up being Victorians living in Colonial India on a watermelon plantation...bravely going it on their own after their parents' tragic disappearance in the wide river that separated their spacious home and the watermelon fields.

 

The river, of course, was the driveway, and the melon fields were the iris plants in the flower beds along the south side of our house. I discovered that iris pods bear a striking resemblance to miniature watermelons.

Their home was under the old lilac bush next to the driveway. In the spring the blossoms perfumed the air, and in the summer it offered cool shade from the blazing Indian / Utah sun. Just me and those four brightly painted plastic old men rabbit figures. Or as I saw them: ahead-of-their time adventurers battling cobras, tigers, the fickle river, and societal norms. All the while - and against-all-odds - keeping their parents' watermelon plantation thriving!

And forty years later, I still see those girls in my head every spring.

I never said I still wasn't a little odd.