I grew up on a farm in New England in the 1950s with five sisters and 20,000 chickens. This kingdom of ours remains large in our minds because we were free, completely unfettered, living each day in a place that loved us and fed our imaginations. These were the "wonder-bred" years for us where every day was twice as long as the days are now and summer lasted forever.

We had a Snow Queen who took up residence in our forest every winter. She was a sweet-natured creature who listened patiently to our tales of woe, showed us how to make wreaths out of princess pine and took us on walks while she lectured on topics sometimes too advanced for us – the formation of ice crystals, wind and water, glaciers, the northern lights. We were so bedazzled by her that we could sit still in her presence for hours. She probably thought we were incredibly attentive students.

Click Here to view more images of the Snow Queen

We didn’t have any problems with mice on the farm we had a problem with Elves. There were Elves everywhere. We knew where they lived but we didn’t bother them very often – they were busy little creatures that made it clear to us that time was short and they had much to do. I found an elf house recently at the south end of Lake Harriet in Minneapolis. It seemed awfully small to me.

Sometime in the late 1940s, my father’s parents moved into a big white farmhouse on ten acres. After the war they fixed up an outbuilding, transforming it into what we have always known as “The Little Red House” and my parents moved in with my oldest sister. Three of us were born there very quickly, one after the other. It was a small house and all four of us little people slept in one bedroom.

We had a sandbox, a wooden swing, and some lawn, but the rest of our world in the Little Red House was made up of meadows and forest, ancient pear and apple trees, berry bushes, and the peacefulness of a farm in the country. My dad had a few chickens. It all has to start someplace doesn’t it?

My parents bought the farm next door and suddenly there were skeletons in the meadows, huge white buildings going up with tremendous noise. We filled up the new space with a large vegetable garden, five enormous outbuildings, and 20,000 chickens. Imagine waking up every morning to 20,000 chickens. We moved out of the Little Red House, just a short walk on a gravel road to the new farmhouse where, once again, there were only two bedrooms.

Looking back I wonder why one of those skeletons didn’t become a bedroom or two for the gaggle of us. All six of us slept dormitory style in one big room on the second floor with windows overlooking the cigar trees and beyond these, the field where every summer we built a maze in the six-foot-tall long grass. That maze was our summer glory. We had big rooms and long, twisting corridors – it was a marvel of intelligent engineering – or so we thought.

We all ran wild on the Farm. We knew every inch of those combined fifteen acres. In winter we were Dutch children skating from a pond on the adjoining farm through the woods on frozen streams. My mother knitted us red hats and mittens so that she could see us easily against the backdrop of snow.

In summer we ate from the big blackberry bush, fished for tadpoles in the pond behind a chicken coop and built forts in the woods. We collected Japanese beetles with which to torture our enemies, staged plays and puppet shows and collected fireflies in jars to light the porch. My father made root beer and built us a swimming pool out of boards and canvas.

This is Skinny, a very scary forest creature that bloomed in our imagination one summer when we discovered a shack in the forest. Although the forest was our domain, our kingdom, we understood that it was a moody place, sometimes fun and full of light and other times dark and creepy, not to be trusted. The shack was just a one room derelict with a small window, and inside, there were the remains of a rusted iron bed, piles of rotting leaves and multi-legged shadows.

We knew it was Skinny’s house. How we knew this, I don’t recall. On days when we felt brave we would fill our pockets with stones and sneak up on the shack, hiding among the trees, waiting for just the right moment to shatter the stillness with a rattling barrage, sending the birds flying and ourselves running from the creature screaming, “Run, run, run for your life. Here comes Skinny with the butcher’s knife!”

Decades later when I returned to the Farm, I found a hint of the path that led into the woods at the back of the property. I was looking for the tree that had scared us half to death when we were little, the spooky sentinel guarding the path into the woods. I remember standing frozen in fear, watching that tree warily, working up my courage to make a dash for the woods beyond.

On the trek home, sometimes at dusk, I’d stop and do my scary-tree dance, rocking back and forth, waiting for the right moment when the monster wasn’t looking to make my break for home. On my return years later, all I saw were trees.

Not all of the creatures in our forest were scary. There was a twig bug whose protective coloration was so good I only saw it once while I was stretched out on the branch of a tree, close enough to the bark to see the sneaky little critter move. There was a creature we rarely saw because she came out at night and one of the non-negotiable house rules was that we had to be home by dark. Most of the time we obeyed this rule in fear of losing our rights to the kingdom.

One evening though dusk had already fallen and we were still one forest and two meadows away from home. We heard a rustling noise that sounded just exactly like my mother’s dinner gown, a swishing satin against tulle noise, and there she was, shimmering in the dark – a night creature. We saw her once again and just once; she flung her arm out and said, “Go home. Now. There’s a storm coming.” We believed her, running as fast as we could and just as our feet hit the front porch, we heard thunder in the distance.

Then there was Angie. Angelina Battista Moroni, a gorgeous wisp of a witch who lived as far away from the Elves as she could since she preferred peace and quiet to the constant rattle and ping of their building projects. Angie was the first witch we had ever met; she was charming, well read, quite a good landscape painter, and she wore rings on her toes, a chic adornment I wouldn’t see in fashion until decades later. On the weekends, she read the classics to us and while Byron was a bit beyond us, we adored Dickens. She taught me to draw. “It’s the bones,” she said. “You have to understand the bones”.

We started with Harvey, the skeleton she kept on a willow chaise lounge on the rooftop deck of her tree house. I learned the bones and how to work them up into a fully fleshed figure. Angie said there were bones in everything that was visually appealing – in buildings and bridges, landscapes, even in something as simple as an apple. Angelina Battista Moroni was so fetching I wanted to go to college to become a witch just like her when I grew up

Here I am, still a baby in 1950, sitting on my lap in 2004. The power of Photoshop! Thanks to Tom Conant and his Photoshop course offered by Santa Cruz County’s Adult Education program. This is my final class project and I hope you’ve enjoyed it.

I confess that I didn’t do as well in Tom’s Web Design class and, since I didn’t want to be the only student without a web page, I went to WaveRider Design for help. Thank you Tanner!