The Hills

The uninitiated would have hard time identifying any "hills" in a 20 miles radius of our house, but we know better. Once when the ditches were being re-dug Dad decided to ask them for some of the leftover dirt so we could level out the backyard (AKA The Back 40). Ha. Haha. We've since lost3 British exploration expeditions to the maw that was The Back 40, but the dirt remained in two rows of mounds stretching perhaps half an acre. Texan gumbo is Nature's most perfect plaything, luckily, and we put these "hills" to ready use. I'll only recount a few of the more colorful uses here.

Typically they remained overgrown pretty badly, which was ideal. First they served as bike and running trails. Then we started to dig massive holes in some of the larger ones, making a fort. Add water via hose, and this fort becomes a gumbo quarry, perfect for preparing ammunition in a mud war. Don't add water, and they still made perfect quarries for mud wars, but of a more violent and painful sort (I got beaned behind the ear onetime so bad it's still a memory. Brian threw it. He was expectedly impenitent. War is war, eh?). One of may favorite times was when we made the valleys between the hills into houses. Using sturdy dried out bloodweed stabbed into the ground around a perimeter and balanced over the top, we could use grass clippings and such to thatch a roof. These houses rarely survived a mildly windy night. The hills even had their own form of currency, red rocks being the standard. Luckily our driveway (made with loose river bed rocks) was an ideal source of the bullion. I think we even planted watermelons back in those hills one time.

We'd spend hours in those hills, sometimes so busy our parents must have wondered why such ingenuity and effort couldn't be expended on more useful chores, and sometimes just laying on the hard packed trail reading. Any more memories from the hills? I'm sure Brian has some horror story about having to mow them.