102622

I liked to play with green plastic army men, as I called them when I was eight. I'm sure that a lot of kids did. But I didn't have much money and I only had one package of them. My pacifist mother wouldn't buy them for me. One pack wasn't enough for more than a skirmish. I got some clay out of the stream below the house, the same clay that my father had used to make a dam in the stream. I made spheres and cones, because those shapes were easy to make, and I probably made a hundred of them. They were a lot smaller than the plastic men, but they counted equally. Then I could have real wars on the floor of my room. By the time I grew up, left home, and threw them away, the clay figures were starting to crumble. I had only air-dried them, not fired them. For one thing, I hadn't known that firing was a thing. And besides, we didn't have a kiln. But they lasted until long after I stopped playing with them.