This is more a memory nudge than a tutorial. An invitation to play.
It's been many years since I made mud pies – more than half a century in my childhood, thirty or more years when my sons were little boys. I suddenly wanted to make them again. Maybe I wanted to make sure I remembered how – Grandkid is now old enough…
First I had to get a bowl, this one borrowed when I wasn't looking from my own kitchen; this phrasing tells me my mother must have looked the other way when I needed a mixing bowl for mud pies.
You need dirt and water for mud pies – simplest of ingredients. My garden has splendid dirt. It makes wonderful mud.
Doing as I did as a child in a garden on the edge of a ravine with the haunting sound of a train whistle across the way, today I formed the mud pies on a piece of wood. And then a mud person. And then some round balls, just to use up the rest of the mud dough.
Some were left plain and some were decorated.
Then they were put in the sun to bake.
As a child I would have gone inside my little house in the lilac grove and happily puttered on the packed earth floors, between the living walls, under the leafy roof, companioned by the sun and wind and many fascinating creatures.
Done. Warm. My fingers remembered how to release them from the wooden baking tray by gently gripping and firmly pushing sideways.
They were admired.
Mud Man got grinned back at as well.
Then all were put back in the garden and with rain that came from the hose were returned to the earth.