There she is! I have a lot of sympathy and caring for my child. She was crazy tall for her age (the tallest kid in her class until half way through high school), skinny and serious looking. People always thought she was much older than she was. That’s why her mother kept her in ringlets and hair ribbons to try to signal to people “She’s 8 not 12” but it didn’t work. I just looked weird and old-fashioned. The only child of an older mother who was surprised to become pregnant after she’d given up hope, I lived in an adult world in the city with a working mother. My refuge was books (fantasy) and my grandmother’s garden which was tiny but seemed like a vast jungle to me. For a multitude of reasons my childhood was mostly stolen from me but “Imagination” speaks to the odd young/old/tall in body/very young in spirit child that I was.
