I love watching the squirrels and I'm sure they would like to visit our Tree House. We can leave them some bread and nuts, but we do have to be careful as they will come to expect food.
this photo was taken by a friend,Marv Berryman of Colorado.

Letters and cards

Downsizing is just that
To carry less in one’s life

And yet I cannot
Let go of some things

Lynda wrote me notes
Constantly in the seventh grade

I never look at them or read them
But each folded note is a time capsule

of books and bears

When I was a child I lived in books, discovered at an early age, and was a fluent and avid reader by the age of 7 when I moved up to the junior school and discovered that I had already read most of our set books for the year. I travelled through Narnia, met hobbits, played with the famous 5 and Biggles and the secret 7. As an adult child I have read all the Harry Potter books and particularly enjoyed Philip Pullman's 'his dark materials' trilogy, which I can highly recommend.

But my thoughts led me back to the sycamore tree we had in the garden. It didn't have a house in it but my father fastened blocks of wood on to its trunk for us to use as footholds to climb up into its crown where I could sit with my brother and sister, although not in much comfort.

My greatest joy, however, was my dolls house. It was a rectangular construction with a front panel which you could lift off. It was painted red, with a white balustrade, elegant windows and a porticoed doorway, and when opened it revealed 4 rooms inside. My father papered the walls with paper from books of wallpaper samples. Over the mantelpiece hung a stag's head resplendent with a fine set of antlers which came from a Christmas cracker. A school friend of mine gave me a couple of antique pieces of dolls house furniture amongst which was a tiny glass vase with red and blue stripes on it. The kitchen had cupboards full of miniature cutlery and dishes of food - a strong reminder of Beatrix Potter's story of the two bad mice where Hunka Munka tries to stuff a plate of food, stolen from a dolls house, into the fire grate. Eventually the dolls house grew too small for its inhabitants and Dad made me an annex out of an old fruit crate.

The inhabitants were bears - "Syrian bear" was about 6 inches tall, white with movable limbs and a moveable tail - and "Polar bear" who was about half his size and made of rabbit fur. He slept in a miniature picnic hamper in the annex.

Syrian Bear and Polar Bear used to go on expeditions in my younger brother's wooden toy train set. There was a train and about 4 wagons which you could pull along on a string. With the train loaded up with crockery and food, the bears would go out into the garden to explore the nooks and crannies of the rocks under the lilac tree. We had such fun.

A visit from the Mail Art Muse

Last night I was thinking of going to bed early when, shezam! the Mail Art muse popped in and I stayed up and made my Mail Art postcard for the snail mail group.
Here it is...

Favourite childhood games...

My favourite game as a child was building houses - odd for a traveller child, but I loved cottages and other people's houses, and I always wanted to live in one.

My favourite kind of house to build was the `bower', which I read about in What Katy Did. Katy and her family always seemed to me to have the best life possible, like the sisters in Little Women, producing plays, magazines and creating new games. To make a bower I would cut branchs and lay them over a sticks in a kind of lean-to hut.

As I mentioned earlier, when I could get bricks I made walls and even sectioned the interiors off into rooms, but I never had enough bricks to build up the walls so it was always just an outline.
I always wanted a pony when I was a child (I was one of those annoying little girls who read the `Jill' books, and anything by the Pullein-Thompson girls, Pat Smythe or Monica Edwards).

Before I got Bikenstein I rode an imaginary horse everywhere, and this was one of my favourite games. I did get chances to ride real ponies when I was growing up, but I have to confess I fell off a lot.

I was another scrapbook nut. My favourite scrapbooks came with a rainbow on the front cover and different rainbow coloured pages inside. I collected anything that looked at all interesting from Mum's magazines and my comics. The comics were another favourite thing - School Friend, Girl, Girl's Chrystal - even the Eagle, which was supposed to be for boys, but I loved Dan Dare.

Every Christmas I got the annuals that came out for the comics, jig saws, board games and art supplies - mainly pencils and sketchpads.

I got my love of crafts from my Dad, who used to sit in the evenings and make fine beadwork or leatherwork. We didn't have a TV until I was about 14, so crafts and the radio were important.
I was never much for sport, but I enjoyed playing wall tennis (where you play with a raquet and ball against a wall) and I loved being near the sea, messing about in boats or rock climbing.

My mother fostered my love of reading by introducing me to all the books she had loved (like Katie and Little Women) and signing us both up to a library chain run by B oots the Chemists, which people who travelled could use because you could return thebooks to any branch. Boots Booklovers' Library introduced me to Enid Blyton, Tove Jannsen, Joyce Lankaster Brisley, CS Lewis and Tolkien, as well as the pony books I loved so much.

Once, when my parents went to Iceland and I stayed with my Grandmother in London, they brought me back American paper dolls - I had never seen anythin g like them. The dolls were modelled on film stars (I think one was Rosemary Clooney) and I was consumed with envy of American children for being able to get such wonderful things.

But in spite of the paper dolls my favourite toys wrere always my huge collection of stuffed animals - my parents friends were always adding to the collection for my birthday and Christmas. It started simply enough with a toy bear given to me when I was a baby. I still have that bear and the one bought the following Christmas. They are very ragged now. But what could you expect, they are almost as old as me!

Jigsaw Puzzle Addicts

Online

JIGSAW

PUZZLES!

http://www.jigzone.com/ (click)

Nebraska Landscape

Memories of Childhood
By Sylvia K.
After reading Winnie�s wonderful poem and description of a house and a childhood friend, I wanted to add a somewhat similar memory. I am continually struck by how certain memories stick with us. It may not the big events, but some daily activities which left an impression.
I lived in a small town on the plains of Nebraska. The town did have some large Elm trees on our street, but the surrounding area was all farm land with very few trees.

At the end of my block was a large home that had a big wrap around porch. There were big trees to shade the house from summer heat. The couple that lived there seemed mysterious and different from my family. The woman was young, beautiful and quite glamorous in my eyes. Her husband was much older but a quiet man that liked to raise Homing pigeons. He had a pen and bird houses for them in the yard.
During the summer, a niece of the young woman would come from another town to visit. Her name was Suzanne and she had long braids and I thought she was very pretty. We would play together and at this time I got a chance to go in the old house. It was dark and cool in the summer. The lady was sewing and she used Vogue Patterns. My mother used only Simplicity or Advance.
The upstairs had a wide hall with bedrooms on each side. I was impressed because we didn�t have a second story on our house.
Suzanne and I played with dolls and paper dolls and made up shows. We did many of the things young girls did in those days.
The beautiful lady lost her husband as he was so much older.
She married a younger man and moved away.
I do not know what happened to Suzanne either as we all went on our separate ways. Yet, the old house and the stylish lady left an indelible impression on my memory and influenced my interests to this day.

Always Been Creative

I sat and thought about games I used to play as a child. Nothing came readily to mind. I couldn’t think of a single one. You see I was an only child for the first 6 years of my life and my parent’s friends didn’t have young children. My father was in an Irish folk band – The Quarefella’s – and I was taken along to all the gigs. I had the usual assortment of dolls and stuffed toys, my favourite being monkeys.

But as I sat and thought, I knew that there had to be something that occupied my time. It was then that I remembered the scrapbooks. My mother bought me scrapbooks, scissors glue and project packs. They had pretty pictures to cut and paste. I even had paper dolls to dress in pretty paper dresses.

My parents owned a unit in the city. I remember when tenants moved out my mother would go in and clean it before tenants moved in. She took me along, armed with my scrapbook supplies, to keep me occupied for hours at a time.

So it seems I have always been creative – my mother even nurtured that creativity – although there have been lapses over time, after my mother read my diary in my teens I didn’t keep a diary or a journal again until I was in my 20’s, now I keep them regularly and have many volumes.