The First Car Wash Of The Season

The first car wash of the season.
More to get the mud out of the wheels and make driving bearable than to get the cars clean. That is hopeless, they will be dusty and dirty again in no time. As soon as we move them now, as they sit in puddles of mud.
As I try to wash an inches thick coating of mud caked into the the wheel wells, water runs down the drive leaving a muddy stream in its path.
There in the mud, are the children.
They started out helping me wash. Who would have thought so much help would make cleaning so much harder?
Soon they abandoned me, much to my distress, and sought the cool of the mud.
There they stayed, shrieking in joyous abandonment.
To them a storm upstream was sending floodwaters down to burst their dam.
To them disaster approached and they must hold back the torrent, fighting it with all they had. They honed their engineering skills, mixing mud and grass to form a stronger building material. After several failures, they found the shape and design of dam that held up better to the strain.
The work ethic displayed made me smile and made me proud as she reprimanded her brother. Now is not the time to play with tractors. Now is the time for work. We need to get this dam built up before the flood breaks it!
They played together, brother and sister who spend so much time fighting.
And the mud. They got mud up to their eye brows, in all their cracks and crevasses. They rolled in it, they wallowed in it. They rejoiced in it and so did I. Their laughter mad it hard concentrate on my job. I kept stopping to watch and enjoy the small muddy trail of water with them.
Such great joy from such a small thing.