Sugar Sand

Since the school year started, I have found myself sitting in the sandpit a lot. Is it more time than usual? I don’t know. It feels like it is, but maybe it is just that this time, stolen away from covid-closings and losses, makes this just-sitting feel especially precious. It feels like time slows down in the sandpit. I sit, with a stew pot or a bowl , cooking on the sand. I watch as the children pinch a bit of this or that into the bowl or pot.

We look for story. And this is what I treasure with this time I get to sit in the sandpit with the children. Certainly, there is a cooking or baking story here, a hearth and home warmth thread, but there is more, so much more.

I get to see the leaps of imagination, the pure knowing the subtle differences between the sands. The sand is not all the same. There is chocolate sand, there are tiny pebbles, and there is sugar sand.

Hands too small to even begin to hold a pencil or pen, delicately pinch tiny bits of sand, measured in grains. Fingers of one hand seek out bits of tiny colored gravel and pebbles, picking these up just so, to collect as treasures in the palm of the other. These are transferred to bowls and pots and sprinkled with the dirt (chocolate sand) and delicate, almost fluffy grains, of white “sugar sand.”

So Story along with its source and inspiration, Imagination, now go hand in hand with the tiniest of intentional and careful movements. Why push forward an agenda of holding pencil or brush, when there is so much love pulling the children to use the very same muscles and motion in story?