THE MAGICAL POWER OF A PILE OF DIRT

I lived a storybook moment a few weeks ago. It was sweet, innocent, timeless, a magnificent kindling of the innate glow of childhood flickering within each of us, dimmed by wizards of retail electronics and pre-packaged toys, and set free by a pile a dirt.

I promised my four-year-old grandson that on my next visit we would play in his giant pile of sand. On one of the last warm days of fall, when his older brother, Tommy, was off playing video games with the big boys, Christian and I donned our "play clothes," (he loved that I called my old jeans, t-shirt, and sneakers my "play clothes,") and jumped into the sand pile left over after their home's construction. To my delight, his six-year-old sister, Keira, set aside her Barbies and joined in the fun.

We found some leftover bricks and rocks to add to our building supplies, and used whatever we found lying around to dig and trench. An hour into our project we had laid out a city based on David Macauley's book "Castle," and of course we had an awesome castle with a high-banked moat, in the center.

An older neighbor boy happened by with the intention of joining up with the video-game squad. Intrigued by what we were doing, he stayed and joined our castle-brigade. He and Keira took on the role of structural engineers and began digging tunnels intended to connect to the moat Christian and I were constructing. As you can see, we were feeling quite pleased with our success.

Sadly, life interrupted play, as it so often does, and Christian was pulled from the sand pile for his annual parley with the pediatrician. Fortunately, the basic construction was complete, and I promised him we'd save the filling of the moat for his return.

Keira was also being beckoned to leave the sand pile to meet up with her friends, and this grandma thought sandbox time was over for the day. Not so.

My green-shirted friend was committed to digging his lake and completing the moat construction, and so, the two of us dug on.

The castle took on a life of its own, and like a brick-and-sand Pied Piper, it drew other children to its magic.

Two football-playing brothers, friends of Christian's older brother Tommy, stopped by to check out our project, and even these "big boys" were bitten by the sand-bug. Without a word of overt encouragement, they set down their Nintendo paddles and joined  in the fun.

 With the majority of the castle and moat-work completed, they began working on way-cool details like dungeons, highways, and secret pits while my green-shirted compadre continued digging his "piece de resistance"--the giant lake.

We added a tower, complete with a sock-flag, and thought how perfect it would be if we had a princess to hold captive within the tower's room. At that moment Keira and her friends happened by, and they were happy to provide a Barbie princess for our city, but better yet, they stayed on the crew and began constructing gardens, forests, and flowerbeds to decorate the castle grounds.

 Remember the lake-digger? Well, around the fourth hour he happened upon some actual animal-constructed tunnels and a new project commenced--the tracking of the tunnel-digger. Was it a snake? A vole? A prairie dog? We weren't sure, but eventually the engineer was revealed--a fat toad!

Now all the kids, from four to ten years, the Barbie-girls, and the Nintendo-gamers, crowded in around the "lake" to observe this exquisite find. Tommy ran upstairs to the family's current toad collection and brought down a fitting competitor to challenge the hoppability of this new interloper, and within minutes, the Great Toad Races were on!

The games continued for about an hour while each child took turns holding, petting, and launching the toads on new races. When grandma finally intervened on behalf of the poor toads, declaring that the royal games were over, the group took the new toad to the tank to meet the rest of the gang, and I was left alone to marvel over the work of some twenty little hands.

When Christian returned home, we ambled back out to show him the progress. The honor of filling the moat fell to him and his little friend who worked hard to rebuild walls collapsing from the garden-hose flood. Six hours had finally passed when we were called out of the sand pile to prepare for a new adventure.

Before leaving I gazed at the sopping mounds of sand and smiled. For a few hours shovels and pails beat out Barbies and Nintendo paddles. The thrill of a toad tunnel offered greater fascination than electronic mazes. Imagination ran wild and free.

Time stood still, and in some ways, moved backwards to days before electronic entertainment. These kids could have been Tom and Huck and Becky on the shores of the Mississip. They were me and maybe you, when a baseball and bat could hold the rapt attention of a dozen or more kids for an entire afternoon. It was childhood at its best and most innocent, and it made me smile to see that  as complicated as the world may seem at times, there is still magic in a pile of sand.






Copyright 2009 Laurie LC Lewis, (To obtain permission to copy or reprint any portion of this post, please contact the author at lclewis2007@gmail.com)