To Begin at the Beginning

Once upon a time, growing up in the balmy heat, amidst the scrub pines and sable palms of Florida, there was a young girl. She was a curious little thing, a strange combination of shy and talkative. She idolized her older sisters, and so imitated them. She was perfectly comfortable with and could chatter away with adults, but children her own age were a puzzle to her, and she to them. Her mature speech patterns--as well as her aversion to regular bathing--simply alienated her from them, and so as she began to enter her pre-adolescence, she did so at a disadvantage.

She was resourceful, our little heroine, and she had a lively imagination. She drew and wrote little stories and immersed herself with her dolls. And then, her family noticed that she developed a new interest. Whenever they went to the mall, or to the flea market, she would gravitate towards the little miniature stands. She would beg her long-suffering grandparents and stepfather to take her to Dunn Toys and the Old America Store, and once there, she would just look, for hours and hours and hours.

Never the most subtle of girls--subtlety being something one acquired through socialization and interaction, you see--our girl began to drop hints, each more broad than the last. And then, in the Christmas of 1991, Santa and a very kindly-intentioned family came through. The little miss awoke on Christmas morning to find a big box under the tree, and when she tore away the cheap paper, she gazed in awe at this:

Or, perhaps a little more accurately, this...

Except, for the sake of veracity, it looked nothing like either of these pictures. It was a long, low, heavy box, filled with wood. Lots and lots of wood which would someday compose another interpretation of the Greenleaf dollhouse, the McKinley.

Over the next few months, each day that she came home from school--that experience being a tale with its own particular flavor of misery--our girl would fiercely, jealously examine the progress her grandfather had made on the house...first the shell went up, and then other details. The girl, for all her attention to minutiae, didn't care in the least to be bothered with the work that now doubt went into the construction of her dream. As her grandfather labored and sweated and no doubt hit all sorts of annoying little snags, she simply watched adoringly, and occasionally went to the stores and imagined the furnishings, the dolls, the things she would get to furnish her perfect house, to make a perfect life.