Dig up Colors

Puck and I stood over our dirt pit, calculating the best way to begin.

“Remind me to cover this up when we’re finished,” I told him. “So no one walks through our yard and falls in.”

“Yeah, so there’s no ‘fallibility’ in the night.”

Who’s taught this kid about liability already? Probably me and I forgot.

As we shoveled into loose dirt and deeper, we found more patches of charcoal and orange clay. Good signs of an old fire pit or garbage dump, from our amateur research.

“Might be Native American,” I speculated. “Or old homestead. Who knows…”

Puck lifted a spadeful. “Could be blood,” he examined. “Or orange from someone getting burnt for the gods. Except they aren’t real.”

“Well now…”

He squinted at a chunk of clay. “Definitely someone getting burnt for the gods.”

When we closed up shop half an hour later – mosquitoes were lunching – we covered our pit with a plastic board. Puck tested it.

“You walk across to see if it’s available for humans,” he advised me.

Puck’s archaeological interest projected to a long-awaiting plaster brick housing resin mummy in sarcophagus, which he unrooted from scratch while I grilled Swiss cheese and summer sausage sandwiches for my boy. He finally completed the dislodging during Quiet Hour after the bathroom was plastered with… plaster.

“Wow,” he emerged, holding up the black skeleton. “That was a pretty bad kill.”

“Oh yeah?”

“Yeah. I can’t find a leg.”

He returned to the sink to continue washing.

“Oh, yeah, good… He has a leg. He’s got a leg.”

Now that he was dead and cast out of resin and all…

“Can you read that, Mom?” He pushed the sarcophagus into my face.

“I don’t know Egyptian, honey.”

“Please. Just learn. Try?”

Sure. Any mom can pick up hieroglyphics in eight minutes. Why not.

The evening was mild. Puck threw plaster chunks in the street and asked me to take a picture of the “beautiful sky”. He ran off to play with kids two yards down. Later, he burst in the door…

“The kids have to eat catfish for dinner, I think. And the boy said, ‘You wanna be friends tomorrow?’ And I said, ‘Yes.’ And I told him that I’m home schooled.”

Door slam. Then he opened it again and tossed a three-pronged stick into the living room. Crackers scampered after it.

“That can be her play stick, ok, Mom?”

Next time I looked, she was eating it.

My brain was all baseballs.