Marooned

To be a child in the tall house where I grew up in Statesville, North Carolina, was to live marooned on an island. [...] I did the things marooned children have always done. I made society ladies from kitchen matches -- impaled grapes for their heads, inverted morning-glory blooms for ball-gown skirts. An apple tree became a team of horses, its crooked limbs saddled with old newspapers and bridled with lengths of clothesline. At the beginning of World War II, there was enough soot inside the house chimneys to blacken the faces of a thousand commandos, and there were sharp kindling pieces in the pile to carry sheathed in the belt. There were godlike games to be played with the black ants living at the base of the oak; I blessed and cursed them indifferently, sometimes sprinkling bread crumbs near their hills, sometimes flooding their tunnels with vinegar water. And I fell in love with books. [1-2]

Betts, Doris. "The Spies in the Herb House." In The Astronomer and Other Stories. Louisiana State University Press, 1995 (Harper & Row, 1965). ISBN: 0807120103.