Our neighbors had a truckload of dirt delivered this morning. They've been filling in low spots in the yard. Their two preschoolers were on top of the pile immediately. They looked giddy with delight and indecision. Should we shovel, or climb or kick the stuff around, or just sit in it?

Dirt's a kid magnet. No one's ever invented a better toy.

By my parents' house there used to be a spot shaded by big maples, behind the leafy bushes edging the lawn, where the grass wouldn't grow. There was nothing back there but beautiful, untouched earth, ready to be dug and scraped and shaped.

My friends and I bought bags of plastic vehicles at the Five & Dime. The assorted cars and trucks in each bag were barely distinguishable as such. They were hollow, just shells really, an inch long and didn't even have working wheels. One of them would have been useless. But 120 in one bag were a marvel.

That kind of traffic required roads and roads are made of dirt. Our wide, straight turnpike stretched from stonewall to hollyhocks. Small roads curved and branched off to assorted rocks and clumps of weeds and narrower tracks twisted their way into the interior of the bushes. All these routes were jammed with vehicles.

Eventually a summer thunderstorm would wash our work away and allow us to start over again.

I'm glad I didn't grow up in a city where that sort of play would probably have been confined to short visits to a nearby park. I was lucky to grow up with dirt.