I was an only child until I was six years old.

Photo by Valentin Petkov on Unsplash

I had friends, a few of them, but I had much more time on my own, and I was fine with it. Happy to be alone, in fact. I focused on animal figurines; I never cared for dolls. One day, I cleared all the books out of one set of built-in shelves and created a makeshift house. Ponies, upright bears, rabbits, and animals of all kinds populated the shelves. They rolled gobstoppers up and down the shelves and created…