18 Years
Playing mantis
It is summer 2024, my son Lucas has finished college and is for now back in Playing Mantis. The mother and son duo tinkering and talking about the turning of time. Between homeworks were conversations and questions, toys eaves dropping and smiling to a perfect match of love and innocence. Somedays, grandpa and grandma would steal you away for a walk to the Farmer’s Market and buy your favorite pickled cucumber and apple cinnamon donut.
18 years after, those days feels like an infant now. The red building that frames Playing Mantis still standing tall on N. Moore street witnessing the evolving times outside. Now, you are a young man, helping me move heavy boxes, assisting customers and completing a sale. We have grown as a mother and son. The store, still steadfast to its philosophy:
“To make a difference to a few, not just to artists but to children who would marvel about natural toys a bit longer before picking up another plastic toy or video game. The store exists to inspire children, show them what our hands can do in collaboration with nature. How it can spin, carve, knit, whittle and color, making things beautiful and functional.”
It is so endearing to have grown with all of you, parents, teachers and grandparents, to see your grown up children loop back with their own little ones to a place where innocence is nurtured. I, proudly clutching my end to meet the beginning of this full circle.
Playing Mantis, a space we built together as a community, garnished and spiced with all things wonderful like the wooden train finished with bees wax, the woolen gnomes and animals rich in color from plants and vegetable dyes. Waldorf dolls of different skin tones hand stitched and stuffed with cotton or wool. We are all woven together in this little un-wavering place. The world of play has expanded and we have to choose carefully on how to make it work without depriving our minds, our hearts and hands the potential it deserves.
Let us allow the stages of a human body to develop naturally without the clutter of an adult world. Teething, grasping, crawling and looking you in the eye before we confine them to a screen. Let them write, draw, build blocks, solve some puzzles before the dead end of swiping and clicking. Patience is our responsibility, become part of the magic early childhood brings.. The trees are waiting tall for a climb, let them kick puddles from a rainfall and sail a paper boat in a stream. Catch a frog, hook a fish, find your stone and make it skip. It is grand to have the canopy of the sky to star gaze at night and wonder about the moon as it wanes….then morning wakes us all over again with the warmth and glow of a sunrise . The window of innocence shrinks with ageing. Let us with our children be witness to the nature in play before our very eyes.
“ I Believe Children Need an Innocent Foundation to Grow as Healthy Adults”
Imelda
