Growing up I used to play ‘village’ in the basement of our house with my younger brothers and cousin, Chelsea. Basically we each acted like grown ups – raising families and running our own small businesses that made up the village. My name was Kate Brown, and I was raising two daughters by myself (Laurie and Katie, named after me of course!) because my husband had passed away. (Don’t ask me what child comes up with this… but I always had a flair for the dramatic… so there you have it.)
(Left: Me with my two “daughters” looking super creepy with flared nostrils. Right: The only young photo of the 4 of us I could find in my album! haha)
Josh ran a restaurant, which was pretty much perfect for the rest of us because that meant he had to run upstairs and get us whatever food we ordered off the menu at any time. haha… Amazing! Will ran a night club where we spent most of our nights (after leaving the kids with babysitters, of course). He played some terrible 90’s music (often times Joshua Kadison, ohhhh yeaaaah) and we all danced like crazy people. Chelsea ran the library, which I think meant making a lot of noise stamping papers on the inside cover of all our books. haha. That left me to run the grocery store, which was actually pretty awesome because my dad worked for Procter & Gamble and so we had all these real grocery store supplies (samples he was sent in the mail) on shelves in our basement to use as inventory! Although for it being a grocery store – I did a whole lot of shuffling papers, crunching numbers, filing things, writing checks, running ‘credit cards’ through carbon copy paper, and acting super important…. and I. LOVED. IT. I couldn’t get enough of feeling so grown up – organizing all the files, folders, papers, and office supplies (of course)!
So as I was sitting at my desk yesterday, crunching numbers for taxes, and going over our budget for the remainder of off-season… my mind kept going back to those days spent playing village in my parents’ basement. I really couldn’t help but question if this was real… or if I was still just a young girl in a small town in Wisconsin pretending to be grown up.
