Dad and Fred put together some two by sixes into a rectangle under the pear tree in the corner of the back lawn, near the Big Rock. And then a few days later a dump truck came up and drove right onto the lawn, backed up and dumped a huge load of sand into the box they had built.

And there it was: a sand box for me.

The sand was in a three foot pile and was slightly damp, so I could dig right into it and through it and it would hold together.

So I built tunnels through it and roads around it and brought all my toy trucks to run on the roads. 

This sand box made me really, truly happy. It was all for me; brother Dan was too old for such things. I spent big chunks of summer days in that sandbox under the pear tree.

Over time the sand dried out and the hill flattened down, just right for setting up toy soldiers and staging battles. The soldiers were green plastic guys, about two inches tall, in various positions. For some reason the one that stands out in memory was a rifleman lying down with elbows on the ground, aiming his gun at the bad guys. I liked him because he didn’t have a green puddle-shaped base like the standing up soldiers, so I could more easily imagine him in action.

And there was a little plastic jeep with wheels that rotated when I dragged it over the sand. It was wide and kind of flat, not at all like the real surplus army jeep we had, which was tall and thinner.

Eventually bugs started sharing the sand box with me, ants, beetles, and spiders.

When i was getting too old to play in the sand box I started being a sort of big brother to a brother and sister, who were the children of our families new best friends. And there we were playing in the sand box, me about 10 and the little girl maybe 6. We saw a spider and I killed it. She said if you kill a spider it will rain, which I said was nonsense.

But about 10 minutes later, in the middle of a sunny day, clouds gathered… and it rained.