Mud Pie is Good for You
I came here on vacation with my parents the summer I was nine years old. I played almost every afternoon with my five-year-old cousin in her garden. We would play with little tin plates and small worn pots relegated to toys. We would make "tea" from certain types of plants we picked, "rice" with seeds from other weeds, and mud pies with the loose earth we gathered under her mother's flowers. The little area behind the large cement sink was her "kitchen." The chickens wandered all over, sometimes leaving their droppings in the "kitchen." The pig sty was nearby, and so were the flies that feasted on their effluvia. For me it was something new. Back in Boston we lived in a third floor apartment and I rarely ventured down into the yard, which was left to its own devices. I played on the back porch mostly, or rode my bike up and down the street. Our house wasn't shiny clean, but it wasn't filthy. My cousin, however, had grown up on a fa...