Artemis Winter at play

Artemis Winter’s favorite thing to do with his time was to cross the street, walk around the corner and go into the Dragon Park.  The park was not actually named the Dragon Park since it was dedicated to a war veteran, but Artemis Winter’s mother had named it the Dragon Park and that name stuck. 

The park ran next to the train tracks or perhaps the tracks ran next to park, but either way it was a great place to watch trains and race trains and make train noises.  It also had lots of grass.  Most parks in the city had only bark mulch or gravel or concrete, but the park nearest his house had lots of grass to run on and roll in and finger comb and pretend to eat.  The grass invited many other interesting things that the other parks did not tempt to them, most especially soccer players of all ages and cultures.  Since Artemis Winter rarely spoke it was especially fun to be permitted to join in rambunctious, confusing play in which no one expected to understand anyone else but everyone was running around and tripping over a variety of games and children and dogs and things.

However, to cross the street, Artemis had to hold an adult hand attached to an adult body so he could only go to the Dragon Park when there was an available adult to accompany him.

His second favorite thing to do, therefore, was to play in his own backyard.  Behind his sprawling house was a sprawling garden which contained one magnolia tree, a lilac hedge that had over grown an entire corner, a hammock, a couple of flower patches, a small pool and an old cast iron, claw foot bath tub.  When Artemis Winter’s parents had first moved in, before he was born, the corner not taken up by the lilac hedge was taken over by a forest of mile-a-minute grass supporting an intricate network of some sort of alien cucumber vines.  These cucumber vines in turn freaked out Lulu to the extent that she pulled it all out and burned it at midwinter.  For years thereafter she couldn’t figure out what to put in place of the freaky space cucumbers so it was left as a bare-ish patch of earth that Artemis Winter used for mud pies, mud clouds, mud balls, etc…  Materials mined from this area played a large part in his outdoor bath tub play which then resulted in an even more comprehensive indoor bath tub play-time.

On horrible weather days, when his parents would not permit him out of doors, Artemis Winter would play with his toys.  He would start by picking out a group of them and play with just those for hours on end.

Often his play centered around his doll house made in the style of a tree house.  A great deal of this play was based on his experience of the various boarders who lived in other parts of the house. 


There was the couple who were slightly unhinged and yelled at each other a great deal, though not in an angry way, they were just loud.  They left notes for each other on the door into their rooms which Artemis Winter found very fascinating.  He represented them in his play as two people and a frog who rarely had spoken conversations.  It is unclear if this was because Artemis Winter himself did not speak much or because the normal conversations they had didn’t leave an impression on him.  It is even more unclear where the frog came in. 

In his play, these people would do acrobatics, have food fights and leave each other notes.  The female person (sometimes represented by a wooden girl doll and sometimes by a half chewed Pretty Pony Artemis Winter found in a storm drain) would leave notes only for the male person.  She may have been pretending the frog didn’t live there or perhaps she hoped it would leave or maybe she didn’t think it could read; quite possibly she was a little insane.  Perhaps she didn’t leave notes for the frog because it didn’t use the bathroom (it lived exclusively in the dining room and kitchen even though it had a handsome bedroom of its own in the tree house) and most of the notes she left for the male person concerned the fact that she had clogged the toilet and he should consequently not come home but go somewhere else to use the potty.  The female person’s name was Gladys.

Mind you, during this period of his life, Artemis Winter was still in diapers.  He had given the whole potty training thing a try and decided he wanted no part of it.

The male person’s name was Max and he was represented exclusively by a tube of Beaudriard’s Butt Paste that Artemis Winter had picked out on one of his shopping adventures with Lulu.  Max would huddle with the frog and they would pass a slate back and forth with messages- written, erased, replied to, erased- so quickly that no one but the two of  them could tell what they were conversing about, not even Artemis Winter.  When pressed for more details, Artemis Winter would suggest that it was private and it was rude to pry.

Meanwhile, Max’s notes to Gladys were often reminders about grocery lists and things to not forget.  Sometimes he would write scraps of lovely verse to things like her right eyebrow, her bunion or the smudge on her cheek.  However, since she quickly covered these with a deluge of strong warnings about the potty it is doubtful that she ever read them.

The frog was either unnamed or refused to share his name, and Artemis Winter, being a sensitive boy, didn’t like to crowd him.  Other than his unknowable and transient words with Max, the frog left no notes.  However, from time to time, at no regular interval, he would go into some sort of frenzy and tear the whole tree house to pieces.  After such a frenzy Artemis Winter could count on him sleeping for a whole week.

While the frog slept, Gladys and Max would disappear from doll house tree house play and be replaced with an enormous man, both tall and wide, who had a continuous litany of, “sorry, so sorry, pardon me, excuse me, oops, so sorry…” and who had been named The Apol-o-giant by Artemis Winter.  The Apol-o-giant was usually represented by his anatomically correct boy doll (named Titus by the manufacturer) who would randomly knock over all the furniture and eventually trip hugely over the whole tree house doll house at which point Artemis Winter would fall over himself and giggle until he couldn’t breathe anymore.  That was usually it for the Apol-o-giant, though sometimes Artemis Winter would take him swimming in the real kitchen sink and make an Apol-o-giant mess.

At some point after being stuck inside, Artemis Winter would stop playing with his toys and go through the house systematically, one room at a time, and remove everything from its proper place and spread it all evenly across the floor.  Then he would go to bed.