Timmy and the sandbox (from Molly)

The following was sent to me (along with several more which will run in the coming days) by our sister Molly Tims. Thanks!

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TIMMY AND THE SANDBOX

When Timm was Timmy and we lived in the big house in Evanston, IL, he had a sandbox. Timmy loved that sandbox. He drove his trucks in it, excavated it, constructed roads, mountains and rivers complete with bridges and water. Timmy would spend hours playing in there, sometimes accompanied by the “master builders” who would take 5 minutes to half a day helping out with construction and liberally doling out ideas and advice. At times, poor Timmy was even dragged into a game of house, where rooms were sectioned off with lines drawn in the sand.

Timmy was 7 when we moved to Winter Haven, FL. He had been in a rental house without his beloved sandbox for 6 months. (OK, he probably didn’t miss it yet because no one plays in the sandbox in the middle of an Illinois winter!) Will felt sorry for Timmy. Sure we had a house in sunny Florida with an in-ground swimming pool and orange trees in our yard, but no sand box!! So Will used some of his budding carpentry skills to build a sandbox for Timmy out of scrap wood from some of the construction going on in our neighborhood. Sand was no problem either, after all Florida is almost all sand. Will made the sandbox and using a shovel filled it with the wonderful white(ish) Florida sand. It wasn’t as big as the original sandbox, but it was a sandbox. Out came the shovels, trucks …and welts. Every night Mom put medicine on those welts and every morning they would have – moved. After several days of watching more welts appear and mornings finding they had moved during the night, Mom took Timmy to the doctor.

“Those welts aren’t bug bites,” the doctor informed Mom, “they are chiggers, little bugs that live under the skin. Has your son been playing in the sand?”

And so ended Timm’s sandbox adventure days.

Note: Timm was usually paired with Molly for pictures when he was growing up. She is really Timm's early historian. As you can tell, I was fairly peripheral in that account. So I'm really grateful to hear from her and hope she will send more.