In the beginning (Well, more of like the middle)

Half of you won't even know what I'm talking about.

The sandbox on Sandalwood Blvd was big, but it wasn't the first.

The stream ran through our property in Delaware, but it wasn' t the biggest body of water our house ever faced.

When we moved to Minnesota, we stayed at the Ramada Inn, our home away from home. Then we moved to a neighborhood so new that we didn't have neighbors. There weren't even houses next to us.

The lake was across the street, and the mosquitoes kept us in at night. In the winter it really snowed.

I liked it when the big machines came and dug holes next to us. It was a lot of fun to go into the pits, climb up to the top of the dirt hill, and run back down.

We would also dig in the streamlet that ran next to our property. Mom didn't like us to use the garden tools to dig there, but we did anyway. Sometimes we dug for gold. Sometimes we tried to dig to China. Sometimes we just played with our toys in the mud. I half believed we'd find gold or make it to China, but we never did.

Maybe that's why Dad built us a sandbox.