Sandy Toes 'n' Stick Horses

When we were kids, we played outside as often as we could.  Mom would want to get us out from underfoot and, as apt as not, we wanted to get out of doing more cleaning and dusting.  That became somewhat of a balancing act though because when we went outside, then Dad would want us to help him in the garden.  We became pretty good at dodging though, and often as not this would take us to the sandpile at the edge of the woods.

Summertime was our favorite time of year.  There were so many things to do outside.  At the back edge of the back yard, Dad had cleared out some of the woods of all but the major trees, and that made a nice shady spot for us to play in.  It also made a nice spot for Dad to build a workshop, tractor shed, dog lot for his hunting dogs, pig pen for the pigs, corn shed for holding dried corn, and such things as that.  Truthfully, that was probably Daddy’s main reason for clearing out that area, but we enjoyed having a shady spot to play in.  Our Dad was always busy building, fixing, or growing something, so it really should come as no surprise that he needed some space to do those sorts of things in.

One of our favorite things to do during the summer was play in the sandpile.  The sandpile was our mound of sand that we had all sorts of imaginary adventures in.  It wasn’t surrounded by a box of any sort, just a pile of white sand piled onto the dark dirt at the edge of the woods.  We made roads around and through it, buried our feet in it when the sand was wet from a summer rain and made “Toad Holes”, built forts and castles... all sorts of things.  It was where we spent a good part of our outdoor playing time... especially when we had “new sand”. 

Almost every year, at the beginning of summer, Dad would tell us it was time to go get more sand for the sand pile.  Due to rain, and our spreading out the pile more than we were instructed to, the dark dirt of the woods had started mixing into the white sand.  Given enough time, it would have disappeared altogether.  We didn’t buy bags of clean white sand from the hardware store like folks do today, we’d go get our own with the tractor and the wagon.  A couple miles down the road, the land changed from red clay to white sand.  Dad figured that no one was going to complain if he cleaned out a stretch of the ditches on those country roads, and as it turned out, the whitest, cleanest sand happened to be in the ditches where it had washed off the sandy road during the rain storms. 

Dad would hook the big wagon onto the back of the tractor, and we’d all pile in.  Off we’d go down the bumpy red dirt road that ran by our house at the time (like all the roads around here, it’s paved now).  We’d stop at Grandmother and Granddaddy’s house “next door” (there was actually a big field between the two houses, but to us it was next door) to pick up Granddaddy, and set out for the sand country.  No seat belts, not even any seats... just sitting in the wagon hanging on to the wooden sides while Dad drove the tractor down the road, bouncing and bumping as we went. When we got to the ditch he had chosen for this year’s sand, he’d pull the tractor over and we’d all pile out. 

Dad and Granddaddy would take the shovels and get some of the sticks, weeds, and rocks out of the way first, then begin filling the wagon as full as they could with new sand.  On the way back, Granddaddy and us kids would ride on top of the pile.  Of course, some of the sand would leak out on the way back.  My sister and I worried about all that sand going to waste (truthfully, it wasn’t much, but any was too much to us kids), when it could have been part of our sandpile when we got home, but there wasn’t anything we could do about it.  It was, after all, just a wooden wagon with wooden sides, made of whatever boards Dad and Granddaddy could get their hands on at the time, but it served its purpose well enough all through the years.

We’d make our way home (a little slower than we went), pull up to the edge of the woods and dump the new sand into its spot.  My sister and I couldn’t wait to play in it.  If the going to get the sand wasn’t a grand enough adventure, the time spent in our new sandpile always promised to be.

I’m sure there were games of “King on the Mountain” while it was still piled high, followed by sand castles, roads and toad holes as time went by.  I can still remember the feel of burying my feet in the cool sand on a hot summer’s day.  I remember racing my sister to the sandpile when we were given permission to go out and play.  Part of the competition was who could get there first, but the larger part was who was going to get the blue car.  We had one of those plastic cars with the wheels that would pop off if you pressed down too hard.  But we only had the one.  So it was a race (and often an argument as to whose turn it was) to get to the blue car. 

It didn’t take much to entertain us back in those days.  A long stick could become a horse that we rode around the yard.  Scratch some squares on the hard ground in the woods and you have a hop scotch board.  Small rocks would be gathered as each player’s marker.  Sometimes Mom would give us a few pieces of old clothes (which were always way too big for us) and we’d put those on and pretend to be movie stars, or “The Queen of Sheba” (somehow our supreme ‘someone’ that we would pretend to be).  “Tend Like” (short for ‘pretend like’) was our phrase that we’d say to each other to create the fantasy world we were playing in at the time. 

Then there was Daddy’s Shop.  He kept an old rusty bucket underneath the workbench that had nothing but bent nails in it.  He always had scraps of wood lying around, and would loan us a hammer (as long as we faithfully promised to put it back when we were done.... which we did.... most of the time).  If we wanted to try building something, we had to straighten the nails out first.  Sometimes we’d need a little help from him, but mostly it was just hammering pieces of wood together for something or other we wanted to make.

I’ve often said that life was simpler back then (and parts of it actually were), but the reality of it was something different from an adult’s point of view.  Life was hard, money was scarce, and most of the time if we had anything it was because we made it or grew it ourselves.  When we played, it was our imaginations that kept us busy.  Oh, we had toys, but they were mostly for “inside days”.  It was the outdoors that drew our attention on the warm, dry days of summer, and our imaginations that filled the world we were in. 

I remember, I remember how my childhood fleeted by.

The mirth of its December, and the warmth of its July.

~ Winthrop Mackworth Praed ~