Or maybe just make her sleep for a very long time.
One of my favorite games to play with my cousins, Melanie and Jennifer, was witches and princess. (I don't know what else to call it.) Imagine that it's a lovely Saturday afternoon at my grandmother's farm. The morning chores of baking bread and cookies are done. The lunch dishes are washed, dried and put away. Laundry is on the line drying. Our grandmother is resting. We girls are out on the porch playing witches. Yes, you read that right. Witches.
Melanie and I are the all powerful witches, who can summon dark magic. Jennifer, the youngest, was always relegated to play the role of the princess.
We, the all powerful witches, would summon crows to spy on Princess Jennifer. We would capture her, taking her back to our evil witch house? dungeon? evil castle? and force her to drink a powerful sleeping potion brewed from blades of grass and other bits of shrubbery. Poor Jennifer.
Since it was kinda boring to watch Princess Jennifer sleep, she would either bust out of the dungeon (although in hindsight, I'm not sure how she managed that given that she drank a sleeping potion that was supposed to make her sleep for 100 years. Anyway...) or we would wake her up with magic and let her go in one act of kind mercy.
Only to restart the game all over again to infinity.
There was no handsome, dashing prince to save Jennifer, either. This was an all girls club, thank you very much. My uncle and his hired farm hand, Ricky, were off in the fields doing farming things. My older brother was either helping my uncle and Ricky or off doing cool older brother things. They couldn't be bothered with our child's play, anyway, believing they had more important things to do.
Our grandmother kept tabs on us, obviously, but as long as we didn't wander from the expansive yard surrounding the farmhouse, we we were largely left to ourselves to play and imagine.
And imagining ourselves to be powerful witches who were not thwarted by a prince was wonderful. I cherish these memories.
And for the record, I've always thought that Maleficent, the witch from Sleeping Beauty, was just misunderstood.
No comments:
Post a Comment