dirt don't hurt

When you write a weekly column, people are always tossing ideas at you.  Mostly they come in the form of, “oh no, you’re not going to write about THAT in the paper, are you?”  But sometimes, it’s not people supplying material.  Sometimes it’s something greater. It was a rather rainy weekday after a rather busy week.  Visiting my parents at a place we have been hundreds of times, we decided to do what most people never do—be a tourist in your own town.  We all fall victim to this commonality of never going to local attractions until someone from out of town visits, but once the clouds passed we piled in my jeep and hit the back, gravel roads in search of a couple of historical sights. We drove to a covered bridge that was built just before 1900, for the cost of $150.  The economical engineers of yesteryear figured that if they put a cover over their wooden bridges, the life of the bridge would be much longer.  Covered areas also served as places f...

For me, it’s a shot of myself around three years old.  I am standing on our back deck in the sunshine, and I’ve got a perfectly shaped black mustache, thanks to my short career of singing into the hose of the Shop Vac which was just used to clean out the fireplace.   I’m pretty sure I’m wearing a green shirt, but like most pictures from the past, the colors that were never that great in the first place have faded away over time.  The telltale while border around the outside of the square photograph is starting to curl and yellow from age, and the actual quality of the photograph pales in comparison to what we can do today, even on our cell phones. But there’s just something about those old pictures. Today, whether or not you are tech savvy, actual cameras are practically a thing of the past.  Ask a kid what “film” is and they’ll give you the same blank stare they give when you ask them what it means to “rewind” something.  The mere idea of having to take...

As a busy mom, I tend to lump seconds into minutes, minutes into hours, and then I just count the hours until they are all sound asleep and I can finally put up my feet without hearing “Mom?  Mom?  Hey Mom!  Mom!  Mom!”  We run from here to there and everywhere in between, filling our summer days with activities that capture the essence of childhood before it wisps away in a warm breeze. It is, quite frankly, exhausting.  My head spins.  I find myself buying energy drinks just so I don’t nod off on the washing machine holding a baseball uniform that had to be washed for the third time in as many days.  I sound too often like a drill sergeant, barking out chore orders and camp schedules until I’m hoarse, and I haven’t been able to read a children’s bedtime story in completion because the soft tone of my weary voice puts me to sleep long before the children.  It comes to no surprise to me that when I actually stop and listen to the childr...