Lego Blocks Can't Begin To Equal Real Rocks

12. So often I as an adult – to be sure an old and likely out of touch adult-  have fretted about what we are doing to the creativity of our children. Ready to assemble houses, no imagination needed  puzzles, dolls with factory assigned names give me pause. Not just pause-- they sadden me.

 I remember the dining room windows of our house looked out into the woods. In those woods  Ivy and I built our playhouse. We carried rocks, many moved from the infamous barn pasture rock pile, to mark out our playhouse. 

In our kitchen we had a stove made of a piece of tin roofing supported by rocks, a table of boards on rocks. On the table were broken pieces of pottery and tin cans which once help mackerel and other foods Mommie bought. Outside that kitchen was a big tree with a hollowed out raised root which held water in wet rainy times.  It was a right proper cistern.

We furnished our second room with an abandoned bed spring, dragged up the hill from Uncle Will’s house—a good quarter mile or further away. The bare springs we covered with pine branches and leaves.  The hours Ivy and I spent in our playhouse gave us something nothing bought could ever give us. A lively vivid imagination. So lively that daisies became fried eggs on our broken dinnerware, stump water coffee in the tin can.