The Old Blue Barn is up on a shelf right now, empty. Wow, that was needlessly depressing in tone, it's not like it burned up in a fire or was accidentally crushed in a soccer-ball incident-(that did happen once, to another house, long ago). It's right over my head while I'm typing away here. But I had to pack up its insides and put it away when I sold my home, there just wasn't room where I'm living now. And it's a time-inhaler. It calls to you like a tiny siren, play with me play with me, you're ten again and you'll be ten forever, and you're afraid you'll look up, like some enchanted princess in a creepy old fairy tale, to find that you're 95 and hadn't noticed time passing.
But I love it. I just do. All you miniaturists know what I'm talking about. Unless you sell what you fashion from from clay and toothpicks and paper, it's one of the few things on earth that has nothing to do with deadlines, or juror's panels, or even logic. It's self-contained, you do it because it's so much fun, to hunch over and make something minisculely real from something else, to stick your face into a tiny room, hold your breath, and float there, transformed, like a ghost from another dimension.
Yeah, I'll probably take it down from the top of the bookshelf. My full scale things, the contents of my actual home - furniture, pottery, world globes, silverware, books, are all stuffed up into two labyrinth-like storage units. They're waiting for the complexities of adult life, with their contracts and addendums and closing costs, to set them free. But the Old Blue Barn's contents are in a plastic shoe box in my mother's garage. Right over there. This is something I can easily put back together again.
