Children’s Folklore Recent Titles in Greenwood Folklore Handbooks Myth: a handbook

Houses Like Boxes
When we were kids, we used to play on the third floor with couch cushions. We used to 
play house and we built the houses like boxes and we’d climb into it, and in the end we’d 
jump on it. It was four square cushions, and we made four walls. We pretended to be in a 
house, holding it up together. There was no roof.
Nineteen-year-old Peggy, an Asian American resident of Boston, Massachu-
setts, narrated these reminiscences of childhood house-building during a tele-
phone conversation in February 2006. As in Amelia’s description of snow fort 

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96 Children’s 
Folklore
construction, the rules for building a couch-cushion house seem clear. Four cush-
ions, held together by the players, form the shape of a box. Although this simple 
structure has no roof, it helps the children imagine that they are inside a house 
of their own. Sometimes children cover the top of a couch-cushion house with a 
blanket or sheet, which gives them more privacy than a house with no roof.
Spaceship Fort
One fort that sticks out in my mind is when we took two couches and put them close to 
each other and covered the top with blankets. We had one of those learning games (kind 
of like a giant calculator that you could add on), and we acted as if it were a computer. 
We pretended our fort was a giant spaceship and would sit for hours pretending to fly 
around and find things.
I was the navigator, so I would operate the computer, and my cousin Mark was the 
captain who would steer the ship and lead us. My sister and our other cousin just worked 
on the ship (being the oldest, Mark and I would assign jobs to the younger two). Our 
parents would leave us there for hours, and we didn’t need TV or anything. There were 
always tons of tears when it was time to leave. Now my cousin Mark is in the Air Force 
Academy, and when I think about our fort, I like to think we all sparked his interest in 
fl ying when we played in that fort.
Colleen, an Irish American college student from Pearl River, New York, re-
corded her memories of this exciting game in March 2007. Colleen lived in the 
Bronx when she played in her spaceship fort at the age of six. Play of this kind can 
generate interest in future careers as well as providing hours of fun.