Disclaimer: If you are looking for fantasies of a lewd and lascivious nature, you will be disappointed. There's none of that in here.
I was always a loner. While it's true that I had four brothers around me when I was little, it is also true that they rarely wanted to play with me.
Since I had learn to read at an early age, I was constantly reading. When I read a Nancy Drew mystery, I became Nancy Drew for the duration of the book.
When I was nine, my parents split up and eventually I ended up in a foster home. This foster home was a dairy farm. I essentially became an only child.
Besides the house and the barn, there was a separate garage and a shed that was called the wood shed because it housed several cords of wood for the fireplace. The wood shed was a wonderful place for me. It was fairly large and besides a mountain of wood, it was home to an old wind up Victrola. (Record player for those who are very young.) The Victrola was a console model with storage space under the turntable. The reason why the machine was in the woodshed was because it was semi-broken. That is to say, when you turned the crank to start the turntable, the handle would spin in the opposite direction and the turntable would stop almost immediately. To get around this problem, the handle had to be fastened into place once it was turned as far as it would go. This was accomplished with a looped piece of bailing twine and a nail. Then I could play the half inch thick records that were housed in the cabinet. I even remember most of the words to an old song that I called Way Out West in Kansas.
Next to the Victrola was a stack of old catalogs. While listening to the Victrola, I could look through the catalogs and fantasize about having the money to buy everything that I wanted out of the catalogs.
Then one day, during a rare visit from my father, I was taken to the Baseball Hall of Fame in nearby Cooperstown. It was a day when, for some reason that I can't remember, the New York Yankees were at the museum. I got an autograph from Roger Maris and another from Mickey Mantle. [No--I do not still have them.] For the next year, my fantasy was to be the first female player for the New York Yankees. I visualized myself playing in the outfield, catching fly balls, and then hitting a homer.
I found myself living elsewhere by the time I was 11. I lived with a cousin and his family. About that time, I discovered the Little House books. The Long Winter was (and still is) my favorite book of the series.
In The Long Winter, the settlers are told that every 7 years was a hard winter and that the 21st year would be the hardest winter of all.
I remember sitting on the front porch in late summer, the Fall/Winter edition of the Montgomery Ward catalog in hand. I thought I had figured out when the first long winter of my adult life would happen. I fantasized about being married and getting prepared for that long winter. The first item I would buy would be this gorgeoous Persian Lamb coat featured at the beginning of the catalogue. After choosing my wardrobe, I would choose items to furnish my home.
for the border background.