On Childhood and Imagination

"There across the road, it looked like any rocky hill--nothing but sand and rocks, some old wooden boxes, cactus and greasewood and thorny ocotillo--but it was a special place."

Roxaboxen reminds us of the beauty of imagination with the creation of a little town by children playing in the desert. It appeals to universal experience--who hasn't turned a piece of pottery into dishes? (I did it with seashells at the ocean.) It portrays the permanence of place ("Roxaboxen had always been there and must have belonged to others, long before.") and the endurance of memory ("The years went by, and the seasons changed, until at last the friends had all grown tall, and one by one, they moved away to other houses, to other towns. So you might think that was the end of Roxaboxen--but oh, no. Because none of them ever forgot Roxaboxen. Not one of them ever forgot.")

Additionally, it shows the congruence and continuity between childhood and adulthood, particularly in the previous quotation, which shows them moving on to "other houses, to other towns" as opposed to "real houses, to real towns." Imagination is real, for McLerran and Roxaboxenites. Also, their community at Roxaboxen has many elements of adult communities (unlike Wendell Berry's towns): politics (a town hall and mayor, a jail [attempt at justice?] and a policeman, wars [boys v. girls--how wonderful when things were that simple!]), markets (okay, capitalism--a bakery and two competing ice cream shops), transportation (cars and horses or steering wheels and bridles), death (a lizard).


This makes me remember the imaginary communities of my childhood--our fabulous barbie doll house that my grandfather made; our crystal prince villages that we created for an entire summer (complete with grocery stores and doctors and churches--we made it to the division of labor), our "secret places" in the woods where we would make pottery and jam and wrap everything we made in Catalpa leaves.