Writing for life

Q. When is a quilt not a quilt?

A. When it’s a tent, a house, a train, a pirate ship, a ferry, an aeroplane, a safari lodge, a flying saucer, a desert island….

When you reach a certain age a quilt, for all its potential, will only ever be useful for keeping you warm in bed – or perhaps for cuddling up on the sofa on those chilly Irish summer nights. You know the ones: the nights when you can’t justify lighting the fire (it’s summer, after all), but you don’t fancy succumbing to the frostbite that’s nipping at your toes.

For adults, the most interesting thing about a quilt is either its Tog rating (for men) or the colour and pattern of the cover (for women). For children though, it’s a completely different story. With the application of a little childhood imagination the humble quilt suddenly burgeons with possibility.

One rainy afternoon over the holidays the girls were running riot… again. In an attempt to restore a bit of sanity my wife grabbed an old quilt from the utility room, tossed it into the middle of the living room floor and told them to “play with that”.
It worked. Silence descended, and when I walked into the room five minutes later they were busy turning the quilt into a tent, complete with surrounding camp site and a pretend camp fire. They even had their dolls sitting around warming their hands in front of the imaginary flames.

“We’re camping,” they announced, before giving me my marching orders. “No adults allowed!”

Since then the quilt has featured heavily in their play – and has been everything from a bed (which is fair enough) to a shark infested tropical lagoon (…?). I made the mistake of inadvertently stepping on it once, and the three year old practically rugby tackled me. “No Dad, the crocodiles will get you,” she screamed, genuine concern etched on her little face.

At six the twins naturally lead these imaginary adventures, but the little one is well able to hold her own in the imagination stakes. She gets really into it, and sometimes the boundaries between the real world and her imaginary one become blurred. Like, for example, when she answers the phone (her most recent obsession) and explains to the perplexed person on the other end that she can’t stay on because the lions are chasing her; then she hangs up.

But back to that quilt. You can forget transformers – the transmuting mechanical marvels that starred in the recent Hollywood blockbuster of the same name – give the kids an old quilt and it can out-transform any of them.

Wouldn’t it be great if we could all recapture that childish capacity to imagine. Oh, I know we can still imagine as adults – but as a rule our imagination is tempered by our perceptions and experiences of the real world around us. We imagine ourselves in a better job, or driving a better car, or with more time and money on our hands. We rarely let our imagination transcend the limits of reality – instead we tether it, confining it to a set of pre-defined sub-conscious constraints.

Sometimes I think it would do us all good to lift those constraints – to let our imaginations run riot and join the kids in their bizarre games. So I’m off to join them on the quilt – I mean the Ark: the flood waters are rising, the lions are trying to snack on the zebras, and we’re still missing the blasted unicorns….

Technorati Tags: imagination, children, Evening Echo, parenting