The Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Division of Art, Prints and Photographs: Picture Collection, The New York Public Library. "Poupées romaines" The New York Public Library Digital Collections. 1902.

Here is the image for the August Invite to Write:

Our symbol for this month is toy.

Toys are vehicles for our imagination. They reflect both our desires and aspirations and those desires and aspirations of those who raise us. Toys provide a glimpse into our particular moment, our ideas about play, about fun, and about what life looks like. At the same time, this makes toys into time capsules. As time capsules, toys can sometimes reflect our distance from earlier times, such as how our contemporary lense sees victorian baby dolls as eerie rather than cute, it reflects a changing relationship that we ourselves have with child-bearing and rearing and what we see as personhood and womanhood. This eerieness also comes from our own preconceived notions about those moments in history. When ancient sites are uncovered, toys are often the objects that most reflect the everyday life of a culture because toys commemorate the minutaie that adults take for granted or see as unimportant. At their best, toys can bring us back to a feeling of wonder at everything around us, like seeing things for the first time.

Did you have toys that made the world magical to you? How did playing shape your worldview? Do these objects still contain magic for you? Did you find that toys told you a story or did you use toys as actors in your own stories and worlds? Are there toys that put you into a box, made you feel like you had to act a certain way?