Making Time for Play

As kids growing up in rural Michigan, there was endless countryside to explore. Cornfields, creeks, ponds, and woodlots were our playground. Flatland mostly. And in wintertime, after a snow, you would find us sledding for hours on anything that resembled a slope.

One morning, after a night of gentle snow, we woke to our lunchbox thermoses arranged in a line across the kitchen counter. On the stove a big pot of homemade hot chocolate simmered. Our mouths watering, three rumps took their places around our oak kitchen table.

While dad ladled steaming cocoa into our thermoses, mom served a hearty breakfast of pancakes and warm maple syrup to her eager customers. Setting aside their Saturday plans, the new idea, was for them to drive us to the best sledding spot around. Our small kitchen could barely contain the excitement.

Flying down that long, fast slope in controlled chaos, left you feeling part bird, part superhero. Invincible.

After an hour or so, we piled into the warm, waiting station wagon to enjoy Toll House cookies and coco, before charging the slopes again.

We grew up, my siblings and I, becoming parents ourselves. And we each made sure to pass along the timeless joy of flying down powdery slopes to our children.

Decades later, sitting in my easy chair with yet another Michigan snowstorm raging in the night. I’m reading a story about fossilized hand and footprints created by children high on the Tibetan Plateau.

Archeologists believe them to be over 200,000 years old. There were children then too. I’ve never thought about that. I have read about stone hammers and arrowheads, and charcoal from long forgotten fires. Traces of adults are all you really hear about. But these prints were created by two children, perhaps seven and twelve.

Looking at the impressions, you can see evidence of the children playing in the mud of an ancient hot spring. Squishing the mud between fingers and toes. Playfully arranging handprints and footprints into patterns.

And I wondered…

Would children 200,000 years ago have been content to hold up in a cave till winter passed? Or, waking some frosty morning to a blanket of fresh snow, would their parents have given them an old deer pelt to burn off their restlessness sliding down a nearby slope?