Kids had fun playing with ordinary things

Keys. Keys from a dozen or more car dealership advertisements. Keys that don’t fit anything. Keys to a past that never was.
While cleaning out my mother’s house, I gathered a bunch of old metal cars to send to the grandsons. On a whim, I tossed in a handful of keys that Mom had saved from old advertisements. My daughter said it was the keys that caught grandson Nicholas’ attention. He was thrilled to have so many to play with.
I am not sure if the keys replaced the tiny terra cotta flower pot he picked up at our house. While he was here he filled it with dirt and stuck a dried black-eyed susan seed pod in it. He told us he made it himself and that it took forever, about a hundred hours. He carried that pot, minus the dirt and seed pod, around for days. On the way home he tucked it into my daughter’s jacket pocket and was in a panic because nobody could find it.
My daughter washed and dried the jacket. When she put it on, she felt a lump in the sleeve. The missing pot had been found. Nicholas was elated.
He has a habit of putting the pot somewhere then forgetting where he left it. Then he asks everyone where his pot is. Sometimes a boy just needs a little pot.
It always amazes me what kids choose to play with. Granddaughter Emma had chosen a metal sugar and creamer set from Mom’s collection. Once they got back to our house, they went outside to play. When I checked on them, she offered me some squirrel stew poured out of the creamer. It looked like muddy water. I declined her offer and she happily continued creating other culinary creations.
Grandson Jacob found an old cornstalk from some corn that a squirrel had planted awhile back. He was busy shattering some broken clay pots that should have been thrown out long ago. This was after he found a pair of shears and cut down some weeds and attempted to trim the cherry tree.
A tiny pot, a sugar and creamer set, a corn stalk, keys. These are not conventional toys. Yet, the children were not bored. They were happily involved in creating memories. In this day and age when it seems that most people, young and old, are always looking down at their phones, these three were perfectly capable and happy to entertain themselves.
Don’t get me wrong, they also are adept at playing on the devices they received for Christmas. They can find things on my phone that I didn’t even know were there. They are as tech savvy as any other child their age. Yet, they are also just as happy to play alone or together with games they make up themselves.
I think this ability to entertain themselves is becoming a rarity for today’s children. So much of their time is taken with scheduled activities, they don’t have time to figure out how to make squirrel stew from dirt and rain water. They don’t have the time to take a hundred hours to create a flower pot, or to pretend they did. They don’t have time to smash clay pots with a cornstalk.
The keys I sent may not fit anything but can be the keys to a young boy’s imagination. They are keys to a past where children had the freedom to use their innate abilities to create toys out of ordinary things. Who was it that said the best toys are the simplest?