Go Dig A Hole

Photo courtesy Flickr

One moribund morning in July my mother sent my brother, me, two neighbor kids, and a couple of shovels into the garden with that instruction. We spent the rest of the summer happily excavating, flooding, and re-excavating one shady spot under the tree where the jay liked to scold us.

Other activities that kept us all sane were making popcorn without a lid, skating on the cement floor of the basement with a dressmaker’s dummy on wheels, costume variable, and jumping the living daylights out of an old innerspring mattress.

Culinary experiments with stale spices yielded an education in bad and good smells, the button box presented a special kind of tablecloth chess, and we couldn’t wait to eat up a box of cereal that had a cut-out vehicle printed on the back. Toy-A-Day at blogspot.com has similar graphics-they’re great for training fine motor skills. Cereal boxes and dry cleaner’s shirt cardboards were our sources for inexpensive playthings.

A friend who grew up on a dairy farm said he learned at an early age never to complain about having nothing to do because the first time he said that, his father sent him to muck out the calf barn.

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