Rag Doll Dreams

When I was a child, my mother read every book in Laura Ingalls Wilder�s �Little House on the Prairie� series to me. The story is based on a young pioneer girl growing up in a time when having butter for your bread and heat for your house meant serious work. Laura and her family didn�t get catalogs in the mail for patio furniture or food scales. They didn�t watch HGTV or pay for DISH satellite and a Sam�s Club membership.

Life was simpler. They didn�t worry about weighing their food, because there wasn�t that much to eat. DISH and HGTV were called church and friends. Sam�s Club was a dream. I think I could have been Laura, because I miss those days.

As a kid, I grew up playing in the woods, making serious mud pies with my sister and cousins, hiding in hay bales when I wasn�t quite ready to go in yet and dreaming under the stars instead of scanning YouTube. As my sister passes on the Little House tradition to my niece and nephew, I see joy once again in a rag doll and wooden whistle. At what point did we think more was better?

In 2017, Americans spent over $400 billion dollars on unnecessary goods. Don�t get me wrong � I like movies, weekend getaways and new shoes as much as the next girl. But I found it incredibly ironic that on the same day I was scrolling through Pinterest for ways to minimalize my stress and learning to declutter my closets, I also was paying bills for credit cards, volleyball shorts and Kalamata olives. Did you know you can make a rag doll on Pinterest? Just saying! What is wrong with this picture?

I think in our daily struggle to find balance, we often overlook how much stuff we have and how little value it really has. Take the volleyball shorts. Of course I want my girls to fit in with the other kids, and even though I don�t like the way they look, I, like many other mother-consumers, dropped $60 for shorts to play volleyball in. (Because you know, they couldn�t play volleyball in regular shorts!) The marketing gurus have taken our country by storm.

Minimalism in its varying degrees is an individual choice. Some of us like things, some of us grew up when things were hard to come by, some of us just really hate cleaning, and some of us, like me, inherited a gene for starting a big fire every spring and literally throwing out the old. To each his own, but in a world where I struggle to find time to sit down with friends or enjoy a glass of wine in the quiet of a warm breeze, I can�t see the purpose in stuff.

Give me a rag doll and a child�s imagination any day.