By Bill King
When I was growing up, we didn’t play inside the house, except when it was raining or during winter when it was too cold to play outside. Mama used to say, “Get outside and play, or I’ll find you something to do.” I didn’t always enjoy what she found for me to do. Playing in the dirt was always more fun, in my humble opinion, not Mama’s, than shelling or shucking what she had grown in the dirt! I will admit that sometimes, after I went outside, I came back inside…not back inside the house but under the house.
We didn’t have a basement, but we did have a fairly large crawlspace. Our house was built on a slope, so the crawlspace was much taller at the entrance than at the other end. It was tall enough for a young boy to stand up if he stooped over a little. That opening room held all kinds of wonders, including Mama’s canned goods from her 100-acre garden. There, she stored canned beans, peas, and pickled items such as beets and cucumbers, which, again, in my humble opinion, were not fit to eat otherwise. I loved sweet cucumber pickles. I hated pickled beets, but I thought they made good red war paint. Mama definitely didn’t agree!
To this very day, I do not know why, but there were a dozen or so wooden boxes filled with blue chalk under there. Someone said roadbuilders used blue chalk to mark black asphalt, but the road in front of our house didn’t have any blue chalk on it…but then, it didn’t have any asphalt either. Several large rocks dotted the landscape of our front yard. Those rocks made good roads for my toy trucks, so they had lots of blue chalk marks. My sister and I played tic-tac-toe on those rocks, and I did some beautiful blue drawings on them, too. Amazingly, no one ever signed me on as a chalk artist! I could have been a starving artist, but Mama fed me too well for that!
The real treasures, the mysterious hidden treasures, were under the far end of the house where the crawl space became quite tight. There I found pencils, crayons, and glass marbles…at least in my younger days. I actually knew how they had gotten under there, but I wasn’t so sure what had caused that little round hole in the floor above. Watching things disappear through that hole sure was fascinating.
One day, I guess I had grown too much to go that far under the house. I’m not sure if I was actually stuck, but I believed so. I couldn’t turn around and crawl back out. I called Big Pud, my best dog friend, to come help me out…you know, like Lassie used to do. He wasn’t about to come under there. I wondered if my family would one day find my remains and know it was me. If it hadn’t been for that big spider I saw, I might never have found the motivation to realize that I really wasn’t stuck. I never crawled under that old house again, and to this day, I won’t crawl under any house if I can help it. A few years ago, when the floor fell in, my brother and I retrieved the remaining treasures I had left behind.
Sometimes in life, we get ourselves into some awfully tight jams. We may be tempted to think we can never get out, but so often, we indeed can. We simply need the right motivation, and a little prayer doesn’t hurt either! God makes ways of escape. (I Cor. 10:13)
