Our large tree belt filled about ten acres in a long L-shape around the farmstead and provided some shelter from winter storms.

They surely didn’t keep the sub zero temps or winds away but the five and six foot drifts that might be thirty or forty feet from end to end and which lasted for months were more likely to be in the tree belt and less likely to be blocking buildings in the yard itself – like the cave, the house, the outhouse, the granaries, the well sheds, barn, chicken coops, and garage.

The tree belt was six or eight rows deep with ten feet between the rows and with lots of open dirt –  room enough to drive a tractor/cultivator through twice a summer to control weeks on the bare soil.  Our soil wouldn’t win awards for nutrients, but it wasn’t gumbo. It wasn’t clay. It was just good clean dirt and I will say this for it – it made really great mud.

A soaking rainfall over and hour or two in June or July could create standing water conditions out in the trees and the question would come, ” Mom, can we take our shoes off and play in the mud?” The question was only relevant every few years, and by the time we were learning to drive the car (around thirteen years old) we would be asking to play in the mud, so I only remember this happening two or three times.

If the air temperature was above 60 so we wouldn’t be immediately needing to come inside to avoid hypothermia, the answer was yes – and we left shoes and socks sitting on the back porch, rolled our jeans above our knees and went mud walking.

Every step has us sinking ankle or knee deep, the only danger to our bare feet being a sharp-edged stone. Just had to pay attention. Since this sod had been broken only after 1900  and had laid undisturbed for previous, unnumbered centuries, there was no possibility of broken glass, sharp tin can edges or any other kind of garbage that would cause parents to refuse let their children play in the mud. Due to the assumption that civilized children wore shoes at all times during waking hours, we counted it a high form of   fun to run barefoot, with permission, in the mud.

The mud was always cold, but since it was a seldom experience we relished it and stretched it out as long as possible. There was another form of mud enjoyment that was engaged in more frequently. It also required permission, because it couldn’t help but be a bit messy.

Making mud pies required getting a couple of buckets of water from the cistern and could provide a summer afternoon’s entertainment in the shade on the north side of the house or perhaps down near the granary where we usually did our little play farm.

Here’s a bit from MBOB The Book about the value of that water which will help paint the picture of why those buckets of water were gratefully received from Mom’s generous heart – because they were simply needed for the foolishness of making mud pies. My brother and I were #s 6 and 7 of seven children, so you know she could sure have easily said “NO” if she wished.

Our eldest brother whose teen years happened in the last half of the 1930s and the first half of the 1940s remembered bringing water from there on a stone boat pulled through the dirt by a team of horses. He described our water as precious to begin with and then “…the more it was handled the more valued it became. We first pumped the water out of the well, hauled it home and dumped it in a cistern, then pumped it back out and carried it into the kitchen for Mother, or in for bathing and washing, and then we carried what remained afterward to the garden or to the pigs.”

After electricity and running water were available in the 1950s, my own memory of how precious our water was revolves around our town visitors who were accustomed to municipal water systems. When they used the bathroom, it seemed they did way too much hand washing and as the pressure pump in the basement drew water in from the cistern, kicking in again and again, I’d have butterflies in my stomach and wonder why on earth those good people didn’t know enough to use less water.

That water had all been brought to the house in a labor-intensive process. Dad had a three hundred gallon water tank that was loaded in the back of our grain truck and during the summer time, we two youngest frequently had the job of filling the two cisterns located out the back door, one right close and the other fifteen feet across the yard – that one with a heavy cover that was weighed down with big rocks.

The near cistern was off the end of the little board porch, five or six 2” X 4”s hammered together which provided a platform on which to stand as we took the metal measuring cup off the top of the pump to get ourselves a cup of cold water on a hot day. The second was much larger – about fifteen feet deep, four feet in diameter – and supplied water to the house. It was a simple fact that if that cistern was empty there would be no running water, so hauling water was a necessary and frequent task.

In the 1950s my next-up-the-line brother and I hauled the water in a 300 gallon tank loaded on the back of the farm truck, but in the ’30s and ’40s, according to our oldest brother, the process looked like this:

The water that was in the cistern came from the one room school house well located 2 1/2 miles north of us.  Dad hauled it from there in a 150 gallon tank in a wagon with a team of horses.  He pumped the water by hand from the well into the tank.

By 1938 [he would have been 11 years old], I was driving the team and Dick [the next brother down, 8 years old at the time he is describing] was helping me pump the water from the well into the tank into the wagon.  It took the two of us on the pump handle to do it.  We’d drive the team home and dump the water in the cistern.  Then, slowly but surely over the weeks, it would all be pumped back out of the cistern and carried into the kitchen for Mother.

So there ya go – it was precious water that was freely given for the making of mud pies – which was in itself an orderly and deliberate joy.

Sometimes we were given an old pie plate so that we could pack it with the necessary mud ingredient before letting it dry a bit when we would carefully slice it into the proper eight pieces, lift them with a bit of wood serving as a pie server and the slices would be served to one another in all seriousness.

Mud cookies might also be available with little pebbles substituting for raisins and nuts, for special occasions.

We pretended in our play.

We knew we were pretending.

We knew what we were pretending.

We just copied what we saw our parents do, enjoying dessert with neighbors and friends and in so doing, we got to play in the mud.

After our mud work and play, we cleaned up and put all the dishes back where they belonged. We washed our hands, feet, and legs at the same cistern, using a little more of the precious water.

Then we would sit in the sun  on the back step enjoying fresh cookies and kool aid while air-drying our now clean limbs.

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In the 1970s we were living in the San Fernando Valley in southern California. Our boys were about six and eight years old when I realized that they were completely  missing out on the joys of playing in the mud. I thought that the lack could be easily provided by me helping them dig a wide, scooped out hole in our side yard (destroying the skimpy grass of our rental house in the process), filling the hole with water from the garden hose and then telling them to go ahead and play in the mud.

The looks they gave me ranged from “You’re kidding, Mom, right?” to “This has to be a set-up.” And the looks they gave me were nothing compared to the looks I got from the neighbors when I had assist the boys in getting really muddy on purpose so they could realize that I really meant that they should play in the mud.

Our younger son is not kidding when he occasionally says, “Mom, we know it’s not easy being you.” If we were southerners, he would say “Bless your heart!”

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Serious question: Do any of you have an MBOB from your early years and best memories that is begging to be written? Write it and send it to me at the Treehouse email, please!   Memories from summer vacations?   A wonderful MBOB from city-living? (We country kids still don’t quite understand what you did for fun since you had to live in town! 😉 )

Back story: It really is beneficial for me to continue writing as much as I can week by week – but sometimes I sense I’m scraping the bottom of the barrel and find it challenging to create completely new material due to the Path in the Deep Woods being walked by DH and myself at the moment.

He’s doing well in his spirit day by day, drawing on the strength and grace of God and receiving love from his family and our friends.  The daily patterns (ever-changing) in terms of needs and provisions are typical of any long-range and difficult disease so we certainly are not unique. We know that some of you are dealing with such things in your own lives as well or in the lives of loved ones and not everyone has the privilege and opportunity to share as we have had. I hope that what we share might break the loneliness for some of you who may not feel comfortable sharing your own situations.

Terminal illness (which all of us will eventually deal with, after all) is a wearying thing. Really, really wearying. Take care of one another well. Love one another with all your strength.

We are loved well always and are not walking alone. May each of you know the same blessings when a difficult and confusing path rises up before you.