Something I Used to Do

I found this while poking around the computer at home, written a couple years ago. This was one of our favorite pasttimes and my little sisters and brothers still do similar things on the hillside above our house. Only now, Daddy's job is road work and bulldozing, and some of the boys are regular employees lately, so they aren't a part of helping out in the 'truck pile' with the kids.

Playing Trucks

Summer days when Daddy had no work, he came out to the truck pile with us. We had an almost unbounded sandbox, the hillside by our house being pure, finer-than-seashore sand, fair as our blond heads. There we spent hours, creating castles shaped by plastic cups and careful hands, digging mines and tunnels into the steep sand bank, houses like ancient indians. We built ponds and moats for our castles, which we filled carrying coffee cans of water from the leaky red faucet. We shaped tiny footpaths, gardens and forests, gathering gravel, moss and tiny evergreens to landscape our kingdoms, grass for the roofs of houses, strait sticks for flagpoles. Using Tonka trucks, we carved turn-arounds, driveways, highways. Daddy engineered, and taught us how to run the dump truck, grader and loader, how to slant the corners, shape the shoulders, and make gradual grades on our hills. When we were satisfied with our world, we called Mom out and she toured our properties.