ABSTRACT
My sister Carolyn and I found Papa's flashlight. In the broad, full sun of a late summer Los Angeles morning in 1956 we trained its beam on the side of the white stucco duplex on Fourth Avenue. Then we marched several times around this home, owned by our grandparents—with its red tile roof and carefully manicured lawn—pointing the beam everywhere and anywhere. There was no flash in the light until we moved to the very end of the backyard, where a screened-in playhouse stood. It was a large, lovely space, shaded by a quartet of evergreen trees and shrubs that identified property borderlines. It was cool and dark, with a high ceiling. Carolyn and I had never really learned to make good use of the playhouse, though. It demanded a kind of play that I assign to the nineteenth century—or to my idea of large, well-to-do English families: an open, unadorned space where the imagination created everything that was necessary for fun. Peter Pan could have appeared to the Lord children in this space; Alice's looking glass might well have been in its corner. Nana, Papa, and Mother encouraged us to spend our days there, but we had no toys or play things during our summers in California. More to the point, play for my sister and me always was grounded in some kind of reality, and the emptiness of the playhouse was simply too much for us.
