Talks With a History Nerd: Child's play

I feel like I'm a little like Scout from To Kill A Mockingbird, I can't remember a time when I wasn't thinking about history. I am not kidding you, I would play out historical fiction stories with my Barbies. My Mormon Pioneer heritage often influenced the stories I imagined and played out. That was probably my favorite, mainly because that's mostly what I knew at six or seven. Usually these dolls were not on the Mormon trail, because that is sooo cliche in Utah... Still they would be of that time period. I spent countless hours in my yard building doll-sized dugouts,  which I had learned about from Little House on the Prairie. The only problem was if they had roofs then I wouldn't be able to play with the dolls inside so I improvised and only imagined the roofs, building a kind of bowl like structure in the dirt, but I had bigger fish to fry, windows. I looked all over my house for some kind of plastic or glass that I could stick into the dirt to allow my dolls to peer outside through their dugouts. I was never really successful in this endeavor.

Look at that, any young girl should hate it for
its support of consumerism, a pet frog with a
bow, come on get real!!

Although, I was successful in transplanting my Mom's mini rose bushes in to my dirt town, which bloomed quite nicely for several years, after I had abandoned my little hobby. I also would find the tiniest rocks I could and place them carefully in the dirt next to other tiny rocks and create a cobble stone path that accommodated my enlarged polly pocket dolls perfectly. One warning those dolls should probably include is that they do not weather the weather very well, and in fact will lose parts of their faces and scanty painted on clothes. But I didn't mind having a deformed or disabled doll, I could work it into the story, by conveniently having them ravaged by a hungry grizzly bear.

Probably my favorite story that comes out of these crazy days of building dug outs and miniature

If only I had had this kind of talent

cobble-stone paths, is my lack of fabric to sew and my ingenuity to over come this obstacle. I don't know if I never asked my mom for a little bit of fabric to sew clothes for my dolls, or if I did and she confusedly declined, either way I had it in my mind that I would have to find some for myself. My solution, cutting up my old panties to use as material. I suppose I thought that this item of clothing would be least noticed as missing. I mean I had maybe a dozen pairs of panties and it's not as if my mom counted them every so often to see if some had gone AWOL. So I took a couple and very sparingly used the material to cloth my dolls in outfits I deemed more historical than the sky blue mid-drift tank top, and bright pink mini-skirt the dolls had come with. Who did the toy makers think I was some kind of little Teeny bopper that wanted my dolls to reflect poor values in modesty and an obvious lack of intelligence? I don't think so! So instead I created outfits that were pretty thrown together, and made my dolls look more like gypsies than pioneers, but hey it worked for me, and my undies. But my secret would not be hidden forever, my mom eventually saw my homemade doll clothes and recognized the pattern. Later she confronted me and said "Candy, did you cut up your underwear?" I had been caught! My undies secret had been uncovered. I admitted to the crime and she just laughed and then told everyone in my family, whom also laughed at me. But this story has a happy ending, later that summer my mom took me to a fabric store and let me pick out some and later provided me with more as a Christmas present.
So yes I have been a history nerd for years, probably since my first BBC period drama, that my parents put on I was instantly mesmerized, and still am.