Dirty Fun

Evening has fallen; the sun is fading into the west. Kate is spending the evening with her grandparents in Dunwoody. Her friend Ali is on the way. Tomorrow they will leave for a field in Manchester, Tennessee, where they will live in a tent, cook their own food over a campstove, and probably come back home about as dirty as she ever has been. I may have to get the hose and the ajax out when she comes back to town on Monday. I am sure the Spalding County Health Department would appreciate the help.

When Frank and I were young boys, every once in awhile the fun in the neighborhood would be so hard to resist and the dirt in which we played would be such a wonderful, awesome part of the play, that we would come home covered in the dirt in which we played. Sometimes there was mud involved.

Sometimes there was no play at all. I specificially remember one time when my father enlisted Frank and me to help him lay a rather grey/black substance on the main football field at Murphy Candler, in an effort to change the ph of the soil. The substance was coal-colored and about the consistency of powdered sugar. As my father drove the small tractor pulling the spreader, my brother and I took turns stirring the container from which the substance was distributed over the field with half a broomstick. We did that because the consistency of the substance was so thick and powdery that it would clog the spreader if you didn't work on it as you moved across the field.

The end result of this effort, other than having spread some over the playing field, was to cover Frank, Dad and myself with a thick layer of the substance. When we were through covering the field, we looked at each other and we were fairly reminiscent of coal miners in Kentucky after a hard day underground.

I really remember the effort to clean our bodies from the layer of the substance. I know there was ajax or comet involved. It seems like it took several showers. Still, the essence of coal-mining hung around our eyes and in the corners of our nostrils. It took awhile before we returned to suburban North Atlanta cleanliness.

I know Frank had that moment where he was covered with the viscuous green/gray/brown slime of the pigstye and had to be hosed off with a garden hose before he was deemed to be clean enough to take a normal bath. But that was just a mere personal moment of grime and shame for Frank. With a few minutes by the garden hose, Frank was back in the good graces of his home, and actually looked like he belonged in our family.

But, the dirty collective of our coal-miner day was a nice reminder that we all came from a state which used to produce a lot of coal energy for the state and the world. It was a nice family moment where we could all pretend to be farmers and miners at the same time. A nice family photograph where we celebrated our heritage.

You just never know where you are going to get that opportunity to celebrate your heritage collectively and enjoy the deep, down joy of getting dirty. All at the same time.

I even think we are near the birthday of the Commonwealth of Kentucky as I write this. Hooray! Huzza! Huzza! Huzza!