Ashes to Ashes, Dirt to Dirt
I alluded in an earlier post to the fact that our driveway and backyard look a bit, um, scrappy. While we don't have any large appliances on display as I've been told you see on some front porches in the South, there are several sizeable items which have taken up residence on the lawn. First is the sandbox, which is tasteful in size and cheery in color (its canary yellow hue will prevent me from ever running into it with the lawnmower). Then there's the "cozy cottage," a small plastic house with functional windows and doors that our youngest and the next-door neighbor really enjoy. During the summer, I dragged it to a new location every three or four days so the rectangular patch of choked-out grass it left in its wake could recover.
Of course, we also have various bikes, trikes, wagons, and wheeled wonders for riding, pushing, and fighting over. The bottom line: there is no end of fun to be had just outside our back door.
We do get outside as often as possible (especially during that dreadful hour between 4 and 5 PM when neither Mommy nor the kids are very happy about being together in the house), and the kids do every so often play with the toys and structures that have been generously purchased or built for them. But there are other things in our yard that they find much, much more attractive.
One of those things is the claustrophobic space (see my post "Nooks and Crannies") around the two semi-enclosed sides of our garage. Early this summer, the family in one of the houses behind us erected a tall privacy fence, which stands about two feet or so from the back of our garage. A month or so later, our visiting gardener, also known as grandpa, cut some branches off the hedge surrounding our next-door neighbor's backyard patio which had been rubbing on our garage roof. The combined effect of these two beautification efforts was the creation of a nifty, rocky, sort of wooded path around the garage. What better way to explore nature and simultaneously drive Mom batty by being out of her sight in this preschool adventureland?
In terms of backyard activities, running around this path is most certainly fun but pales in comparison to the favored pastime of our eldest. This hobby of his also arose as a result of our gardening grandpa's work this summer. You see, when he installed our hedge, he wisely replaced some of the weary old soil with fresh, nutrient-laden black dirt. That left a good-sized pile of earth with nowhere to go, so he deposited it near the entrance to our "shady garden," the narrow, fern-filled side yard that almost never sees the sun. It's that pile of earth that has become our son's favorite place to play.
He calls it his "sculpting pile," and he works and reworks it seveal times a week with a plastic hoe, my "dandelion digger," an old bulb planter, and whatever other implements he can commandeer. (I remember well the day he requested the crowbar...) He will spend more time in that mound of dirt, driving cars around on it, poking at it with sticks, and shaping it into artistic masterpieces, than he spends on his bike, in his sandbox, and in the playhouse combined. And it cost us...nothing.
From dirt these children came, and unto dirt they shall ALWAYS (despite our best efforts to dissuade them) return.
Of course, we also have various bikes, trikes, wagons, and wheeled wonders for riding, pushing, and fighting over. The bottom line: there is no end of fun to be had just outside our back door.
We do get outside as often as possible (especially during that dreadful hour between 4 and 5 PM when neither Mommy nor the kids are very happy about being together in the house), and the kids do every so often play with the toys and structures that have been generously purchased or built for them. But there are other things in our yard that they find much, much more attractive.
One of those things is the claustrophobic space (see my post "Nooks and Crannies") around the two semi-enclosed sides of our garage. Early this summer, the family in one of the houses behind us erected a tall privacy fence, which stands about two feet or so from the back of our garage. A month or so later, our visiting gardener, also known as grandpa, cut some branches off the hedge surrounding our next-door neighbor's backyard patio which had been rubbing on our garage roof. The combined effect of these two beautification efforts was the creation of a nifty, rocky, sort of wooded path around the garage. What better way to explore nature and simultaneously drive Mom batty by being out of her sight in this preschool adventureland?
In terms of backyard activities, running around this path is most certainly fun but pales in comparison to the favored pastime of our eldest. This hobby of his also arose as a result of our gardening grandpa's work this summer. You see, when he installed our hedge, he wisely replaced some of the weary old soil with fresh, nutrient-laden black dirt. That left a good-sized pile of earth with nowhere to go, so he deposited it near the entrance to our "shady garden," the narrow, fern-filled side yard that almost never sees the sun. It's that pile of earth that has become our son's favorite place to play.
He calls it his "sculpting pile," and he works and reworks it seveal times a week with a plastic hoe, my "dandelion digger," an old bulb planter, and whatever other implements he can commandeer. (I remember well the day he requested the crowbar...) He will spend more time in that mound of dirt, driving cars around on it, poking at it with sticks, and shaping it into artistic masterpieces, than he spends on his bike, in his sandbox, and in the playhouse combined. And it cost us...nothing.
From dirt these children came, and unto dirt they shall ALWAYS (despite our best efforts to dissuade them) return.
posted by Lisa Strandberg at 1:31 PM
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home