I saw a meme that defined a boy as “noise with dirt on it.” That’s a pretty good definition of my childhood, perhaps more dirt than noise. Not that I tried, but it would have been tough to avoid dirt. The only pavement around was Jonesboro Road itself. A paved driveway was unusual. The church parking lot wasn’t paved. Not even the closest store had a paved parking lot. There were plowed fields everywhere. Now I’m reasonably sure I never wore my Sunday shoes in a plowed field, but daddy’s way of telling us it was time to polish our Sunday shoes was by telling us, “it looks like you plowed in those shoes.”
We did have grass lawns, but they were far from pristine. There were bare spots around home plate, the pitcher’s mound, the basketball goal, and around the entire perimeter of the yard where we ran go-carts. Once we got motorcycles, we tore up the whole neighborhood. Hall of Fame baseball player Harmon Killebrew said, “My father used to play with my brother and me in the yard. Mother would come out and say, ‘You’re tearing up the grass’; ‘We’re not raising grass,’ Dad would reply. ‘We’re raising boys.'” I suppose that’s how Dutchtown folk felt too.
When James and Mark were 7 and 5 years old, we went to a funeral at County Line Church. I don’t recall the details around why they were there, but they were. There was a mound of dirt there for some reason (not the gravesite, thankfully), and of course, they found it. It wasn’t just a dry mound of dirt either. It was plenty wet. Apparently, playing in the mud was not interesting enough, so they eventually started throwing it at each other. They were such a mess that we had to strap them into the car in garbage bags to get them home.
It gives me a lot of joy to see there are still kids out there playing outside and getting dirty. I’m afraid too many grow up now being fearful of the outdoors. As Mike Rowe, the host of the television show Dirty Jobs said, “I can say the willingness to get dirty has always defined us as a nation, and it’s a hallmark of hard work and a hallmark of fun, and dirt is not the enemy.” May it always be true.
*** Update *** 05/24/2021:
Thanks to Kathy Wise for figuring out the funeral was likely for my paternal grandmother, Minnie Chaffin. We had an old home movie clip of the aftermath of the incident, and it is indeed dated March 2, 1995, the day of her funeral. That is strangely fitting as my oldest memory of being at her house is making “mud pies.” She would have smiled knowing her great-grandchildren got muddy at her funeral. Who knows? Maybe she did.