Saturday, February 17, 2007

Digging holes to China

One of my fondest childhood memories was digging in the dirt, under our mobile home I lived in with my two brothers and sister. On a hot summer day, sitting on the edge of the concrete in the shade of our humble abode, we'd use old spoons or some improvised digging utensil to dig down deep into the rich, black, moist soil and heap it into piles until we reached sand.

We had seen Bugs Bunny on Saturday morning cartoons, tunnel down through the Earth with a shovel or a spade, and come out in the Orient. . . upside down, no less. We had also seen this on other cartoons and television shows, and we wanted to see if we could do it, too. Our imaginations went wild with possibilities of how long it would take, and wonder if we would be upside down too if we were successful to burrow our way through the center of the Earth.

Reaching the sand was exciting. That meant we were making progress. However, after an hour or two of scraping and scooping, we grew bored and began to pick up the moist sand in our hands and squished it all together in a big lump. We started to make things from the wet balls of sand like sand "snowmen" or pretend to make peanut butter cookies and dirt pies. Kids nowdays don't know how to have fun anymore. We had a blast.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Hey that sounds familiar! When we were about 7 or 8 years old, my cousin and I who lived in Bombay, used to dig holes in the garden in the hope that if we managed to create one big enough we would fall right through it into Australia, which for us is on the other side of the globe!

Stardust said...

Uma, that shows that kids all over the world are very similar. We all think of the same things, only in different places.

I was pretty bummed out when I went to school and learned about that damned molten core that is in the way. LOL!