Birthday Story for a Five-Year-Old

IF YOU HAVE A PILE OF DIRT

by

Grandma Baadsgaard

Happy 5^th birthday Andrew.

I love your smiles and hugs and I love you.

            Andrew jumped into his sandbox.

If I dig, what I will find?

Deeper and deeper Andrew shoveled. Soon a big hole appeared. Andrew reached into the hole and pulled out a handful of mud. Andrew squeezed the wet dirt through his fingers.

Chocolate frosting.

When Andrew took a lick of mud, it didn’t taste like frosting.

Andrew grabbed the back yard hose and turned on the water. Then he filled his hole with water. He reached inside and scooped the mud into a big pile.

Clay.

Andrew made a bowl and a cup with his hands and grabbed handfuls of grass to put inside for dinner.  Then Andrew saw a swallow swooping down next to his mud hole. The bird took a small piece of mud and carried it the highest eve on Andrew house. Andrew noticed the cup-shaped nest clinging to the side of his house and remembered the baby birds that hatched there last spring.

Mud house.

Then Andrew built his own mud house in his sandbox with houses, roads and bridges. When he was finished Andrew saw his father working in the backyard garden planting seeds. Andrew watched his father bending low placing seeds one by one in a long row.

“Soon we’ll have tomatoes, beets, peppers and corn,” his father said.

Andrew planted pebbles in the sand box.

Rock trees.

Then Andrew’s friends Benson and Grant came to play.

Can I have some mud?” Benson asked.

“No, this is my dirt,” Andrew said.

Andrew’s father walked over to the sandbox.

“Maybe there is not enough gold in the world for everyone,” Andrew’s father said, “but there is always enough earth.”

Soon Andrew and his friends were covered with dirt. When Andrew’s friends went home to take a bath, Andrew’s father sprawled on the grass and looked up at sky.

“I like the way the newly plowed earth smells,” Andrew’s father said.

Andrew snuggled next to his father on the grass.

“If you have a pile of dirt to call your own, you have the world,” Andrew father said. “Just think; we live on a giant ball of earth spinning around the sun.”

“Will we fall off?” Andrew asked.

“No,” his father answered. “The earth never shakes us off. God planted us on the earth to grow our souls.”

Then Andrew’s father gave him the biggest hug of the world.