The brief for #26Winters span into my inbox one topsy-turvy morning: the baby had given up sleeping… I was grasping at muted mindful ways of entertaining her sister.
I looked at the objects pictured:
“Marbles…MARBLES! Why have I got marbles, when I’m losing mine,” my internal dialogue muttered.
A trip to the museum was needed, the older child was set the challenge of finding the objects…the baby resolute and wakeful in her buggy waved at the antique dolls I’d hoped would feature in my brief.
“Mum, mum, MUM…”
…she’d found them…
amidst roller skates, diabolos and other static objects designed to move, sat the ‘new spring top’, the missing marbles!
“I had a wooden Top when I was six,” I told my daughters.
My own Dad was a toymaker.
My Mum, a storyteller, spent hours playing with me.
“One Christmas when the weather was particularly bleak, my Mum showed me how to draw colourful patterns onto circles of paper, then cut them to fit onto the Top, we watched the colours mix and the patterns reform as the top twisted.”
The story I sought fluttered into my head.
My marbles? Who knows…the baby’s probably swallowed them!