A Boy and His Tool

He was on to me. He knew this grandma would try to get him interested in an adventure that he might not like, not at first anyway. But we went out the door into the west Texas heat and played on our chalk drawings in the driveway. He needed to work on his hop-scotch proficiency and I was recruited to improve the tracing of his silhouette with a cape and power-charged boots so it would look more like Iron Man. Then we looked around for something else to do.

I decided to lead him across the street to satisfy my curiosity about an empty house that had been cleaned up the day before. (That old nesting instinct hasn't died off in me yet!) We didn't intrude, but I noticed further down the dead-end street some trees that appeared to be a park. I coaxed him along "just a little farther" until we came to a ditch that he recognized as a place where he and his dad had looked for a geocache* treasure. We agreed that the area appeared a bit spooky so we turned back.
"Look at that, Ayden. There's your treasure!" He picked up the slightly rusty vise grip tool and I figured out how to open it. After a good scrub I showed him how to snip a stick in two. Later his dad gave him some real man work to accomplish - snipping off the remaining pins from a broken honor guard medallion he could no longer wear on his uniform. Then he gave it to me!

This mama never tires of little gifts from her "boys."

*geocaching, I've been told, is looking for items that someone has buried and entered the GPS coordinates to on a Web site in order for others to find them.

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