This morning, my sister Darlene (Blackford) was telling me about all of the activities that she and granddaughter Sagan enjoyed during spring break. One of them was making mud pies. That brought back childhood memories of days when my sisters Darlene, Charlotte (Allum) and I made mud pies — lots of them (our brother Duane wasn’t born yet).

During those early years, my sisters and I spent a lot of time playing in the large grove of chokecherry, serviceberry and oak trees behind the backyard and beyond. We hunted up openings among the trees, pushed aside the branches, and once inside, found spaces around big — really big — rocks (the Morapos area is known for big rocks, many of which had to be cleared in order to farm).

These spaces became of imaginary houses, and the rocks were our tables and stoves. That’s where we made the mud pies. We never took any of our good doll dishes outside. Instead, we gathered up throwaway containers, discarded pans, jars and cans — whatever we could use to “cook” and then leave in the playhouse for the next day. If we could find plastic spoons, great. If not, sticks were turned into utensils.

Our mud pie-making expertise taught us that too-hard soil would be difficult to mix with water, so we hunted around for a fine soil that was easy to scoop up and mix with water. The water came from a ditch that sometimes ran behind the house or from the yard hose. We mixed the water and dirt until the “batter” was shiny, like a pudding. It might have been poured into another container and smoothed on top. Darlene remembers sometimes adding flower petals to the mixture. Anyway, the mud pie was left on the rock table to dry, and sometimes the pie could be turned out the next day.

Actually, all of the surrounding vegetation was used some way in our cooking efforts. Darlene recalls using some kind of yellow wildflowers as peaches, which she canned in discarded jars filled with water. Sometimes large leaves were turned into plates, and long sticks became fishing poles. We used these at the ditch to catch fish (twigs), which we fried up in pretend skillets.

During all this imaginary play, we not only thrived while being out in the fresh air, but we slowly introduced our brains to the creative side of life, something that we have carried with us into our adult lives.

Imagine, all this from making mud pies.