PLAYHOUSES A FORERUNNER OF HOMEMAKING?

Sometimes I get a longing to live in a playhouse, the kind one constructed under a shade tree with planks or poles laid down for walls and furnished with old wooden boxes, wagon hubs or some strategically piled lengths of stove wood.

It's a summertime longing, of course. No sweeping, mopping or dusting. No windows to do, including curtains. No beds to make other than fluffing up dried leaves or stirring pine needles. No personal property taxes, trash pickup, utility bills.

When household chores get really boring, I can hardly wait to get them done, sometimes don't, in my rush to get outside to my playhouse and join the living world. And it is living, loud and clear.

Cicadas climb the ladder of their sound tract in a mighty crescendo, then wind down slowly like a running down clock. Lawnmowers mow, dogs bark, birds sing, children laugh and squeal, sometimes cry. Unseen motors on the western interstate highway create a continuous hum, night and day. Occasionally a siren will punctuate the cacophony.

I feel as if I, too, should join the chorus by making some kind of noise. I try to whistle a tune, but it strays off ineffectually. I turn to singing low. Worse. I hum. Four notes, and they sound like the uncertain trumpet. I know I can scream well but I don't want everyone to come running only for me to have to explain that I wanted to make some kind of noise.

The hammer! Yes, the hammer. The tomato stakes can stand a few more whacks downward. And look there, a nail on the garden seat that I hammered in securely this spring is accommodatingly sticking out again.

My notes made, I sit in the latticed garden seat inside my playhouse and, in comparison to my former playhouse furniture, the seat would be a throne fit for a queen. An errant climbing rose branch touches my head and I pay it no mind, considering it to be my crown. A mother wren warns her little ones nearby in the wren house that the queen is on her throne and to lie low. If she only knew my affinity for wrens she would not be so disturbed.

The slim board I had laid on the ground to protect my peonies is my south wall. Some bricks outlining my tiny garden spot form my east wall. A north and west fence serve as the other two wall. There are many doors and windows. No mop or broom in sight. No roof to keep me from looking up to see the movement of the sweet gum leaves with patches of blue sky visible here and there through the green canopy. No painting to do. No tuck pointing. No re-roofing. How lucky the birds, wildlife and queen of the playhouse.

The only food available, though, is raw dandelion greens, some green tomatoes, and, if I move to the northern part of the "room," several green pawpaws. Still, it is such a "trip" to live a pleasant hour in a playhouse one forgets about food.

Such playhouses of little girls, long ago, are prime subjects for the radical feminists. They point out so sarcastically that this ingrained and perpetuated the idea that woman's only place was in the home.

Mama let Lou and me make a tiny fire of chips in our playhouse and cook whatever we wanted to from the garden and orchard in a tiny pan set on two bricks above the chip fire and far away from the leaf bed. Sometimes we cooked only a single big tomato, maybe two apples from the orchard and, if Sunday, some cherries from the Bing cherry tree that grew in our yard.

We dress and diapered our dolls, rocked and put them to bed amongst the dried leaves. All anathema for the "feminazis," as Rush calls them. No one of this generation ever had to take parenting classes.

Eventually it gets a little too hot in my playhouse and I wander into the cool real house, eat a cucumber sandwich (Yeah, just sliced cucumbers between slices of home-baked bread) and browse through a copy of Architectural Digest someone has given me. I find nothing as desirable as the old, open air playhouses which the boys, if they liked you, threw things in through the "windows" or carried away one of the walls.

REJOICE!