The Digging Hole

At the edge of our yard, where the mossy lawn gets swallowed by forest, my boys have a digging hole.

The ground gives easily to their efforts with tablespoons, plastic shovels or long-handled hoes. The soil is sand really—Connecticut River bottom reclaimed—and when they shiver it with broad spades or bare hands, they are prospecting through layer upon layer of time. I can almost hear them loose the thunder of long gone dinosaurs, see their heads cock to the sound of the leather bound steps of Pocumtuck warriors.

This hole is laced with more tangible treasures, too—animal bones, chips of Blue Willow china, a skein of rusted wire. Chunks and shards of deep red brick surface, manufactured on our land when a masonry stood where our home does now. They find railroad spikes from when the line across the road went in and sometimes large squares of age opaqued glass whose once sharp edges are now smooth memory.

From the kitchen window over the sink I hear them put into that hole as much as they take out.

When Dominic, my anxious younger son was about to start preschool, he and his older brother Jason who’d already been through the same school, dug the hole big. When it was big enough for two to fit and sit comfortably shoulder to shoulder inside, Jason took a crooked twig and drew the preschool in the side of the hole. He drew its horseshoe drive, the sticky screen door and entrance wall of cubbies. He drew the snack area, listening space and sinks. When Dom’s first day came he was able to calmly claim the space his brother had helped him with.

When Jason was being bullied in the third grade and came home with bruised shins, Dom offered him a dose of raw power. He filled the hole with leaves and they swung dangerously high on a nearby rope swing, flying off at peak swing and jumping cleanly into the leaf softened pit.

At eight and ten now, they are as engaged as ever by this hole in ever more interesting and complex ways. After the start of Jason’s sex ed curriculum this spring, I heard them howl and saw them fall and roll beside the hole as they threw all the wild names they could think of for men’s private parts deep into it. They laughed till they couldn’t breath and at the kitchen window I was laughing, too.

On days our friends swear the hole is a liability—that my husband or I will break our neck in it walking our dog at dark—I just smile. I know that in a very short while, when my kids are grown and gone, I will go to that hole and lean in towards it center where the memory of my boys growing is stored.