There’s an abundance of memory for me in a tiny sweet gum ball. It was under the sweet gum tree in the front yard of our house in South Carolina where a whole new world opened to me. There were very few children on my block–the ones close to my age were boys who DID NOT play with girls, but mostly the kids were older than me.
I would sit on a blanket under the sweet gum tree with nothing much to do. There wasn’t a bookmobile like in our Georgia neighborhood. My mother hadn’t yet begun to build my library, and my parents’ books were too old for me. So I mostly had a few Nancy Drews or Hardy Boys belonging to Debby and David, with a couple of Spin and Martys thrown in. Not enough to keep a fast reader occupied for a summer. I’d outgrown my baby dolls and paper dolls.
Enter Nancy, the older teen girl from next door, who brought over two Barbies, two Kens, and a black Mattel case full of fashion. It was truly one of the kindest gifts I’ve ever received. Those dolls changed my world forever. They were my first characters as I created story after story for them, and no little girl ever loved her Barbie dolls more.
Thank you, Nancy Jones. You have no idea what an impact you had and what a giant world you gave me under that sweet gum tree. And if you ever read this post, there’s a much longer version here of this story–and photos.
On that post, I used a photo of a case similar to the one Nancy gave me. This is the actual case from Nancy, and I still have it:
