June 1987

As soon as I saw her enter the house with her arms full of bags, I knew there was fun to be had.   She placed the bags on the kitchen floor and began unloading the groceries.  My sister and I would peek into the bags looking at the colorful boxes and asking what she had gotten for us.  We looked for our favorite cereals and drinks and smiling triumphantly if we found ourselves the victors of discovering a great prize.  Plastic bags covered the floor, but we waited for the coveted paper bags to be empties so that we could crawl into them and hide.  Usually there was only one paper bag to carry the bread and eggs, but if we were lucky there were two: one for each of us.  We were used to sharing though and since I was the youngest I usually got to go first.  I remember crawling around on the brown linoleum floor waiting until we were able to claim the bag as our own.   Although the process of getting into the bag seemed easy enough, I often had a hard time crawling in and would ask for my mom to put me in the bag.  The dim yellow lights of the kitchen vanished to darkness.  The smell of the thick brown paper enveloped me and I laughed with joy because I knew I was well hidden since I could no longer see anyone.  After a few second I would tire of the loneliness of my shelter and lift my head out over the rim to expose my eyes, making eye contact with either my sister or my mom before I retreated back into my hole like a prairie dog. Once my turn was up I would push myself forward, toppling the bag and rolling out onto the floor as I waited for my sister to play in a similar fashion.  If we were lucky, the bag would hold up through multiple turns, but usually once was all we got before our paper fortress was nothing more than brown paper.