They played here for over an hour. They were perfectly content to sit in a pile of dirt, pine straw and leaves and do nothing but move lawn debris from one place to another. Jacob crawled around, grabbing handfuls of leaves and tossing them as far as he could. Which was about four inches. He rubbed dirt on his pants and his face, and occasionally poked himself in the eye with the stem of a dead leaf.
Meanwhile, determined to make sure I have no pants to pass down to his younger brother, Caleb dragged his knees across rocks and through piles of mud and acorns until his jeans were worn threadbare. When he wasn't ruining his clothes, Caleb did his best to impart a little knowledge to his brother regarding everything a boy needs to know about trucks.
"This is a digger," he told Jacob, holding up the digger so he could get a good look. "It digs."
Jacob grunted, which to Caleb seemed to signal understanding. So he moved on.
"This is an excavator. It's excavating with its big toothy bucket."
"This is a dump truck. It dumps." Here Caleb paused, scraped up some earth with the excavator's big toothy bucket, and poured it into the back of the dump truck. Then he went on.
"It has a skip. When the skip tilts up, the contents slide to the ground."
The lesson went on for quite some time, until Jacob tired of his studies and crawled away to pull flowers off my bushes.
When I finally brought them in, they were in desperate need of a midday bath.
But after the display of male bonding I had just witnessed between my boys, the filth and the ruined clothes seemed a small price to pay.
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