Box

A box.

It’s just a box.

Four walls, a base, maybe a lid, and a space in the middle. It doesn’t look like much, does it, but it can hold whole worlds.

For example, the above box when it arrived contained, amongst many other things, this:

Like I said, whole worlds.

And then, after it had been emptied it contained this:

It became a bed:

A cosy place to curl up with a picture book. He took every single cushion from Mum’s sofas, crammed them in there and climbed in on top, then thrust his books into my hands and made me read to him while he lay in style and comfort.

Later it became an art gallery, a house, a dungeon, an animal cage and so many other things. Holes were cut in it, pictures were drawn on it, people crawled inside it, on top of it, wore it like a tortoise’s shell…

The lid became a garden. The kids built tiny lolly stick furniture, ponds made of blue paper, climbing frames and a crazy house from an old shoebox. We stitched tiny cushions, stuffed with cotton wool, and made beds and sofas from old plastic containers.

They played and played and played with it until finally the walls collapsed and the space in the middle was just… gone.

But the thing that filled the space in the middle, the spark, it’s bigger and brighter than ever because a box is never just a box.

Those four walls hold worlds.