Playing Spa

One time, when I was a kid, two of my friends (two sisters) and I dug a gigantic hole in their backyard. We were thinking we would create some sort of mud bath to make our skin softer. This was a lot of work. The hole was as big and deep as an old bathtub. Then we filled it with water. That took the better part of an afternoon (I don't think it really held water well). We rolled up our pants and soaked our legs in the mud for a while, but soon decided that we needed the mud to cover our bodies. We put on our bathing suits and soaked in the freezing mud. We all pretended to like it. We lay out in the shade (there was no sun in their backyard) until the mud was all dry and caked onto our bodies. Once we looked like we had a mud mask over our entire bodies, we took turns rinsing each other off with the freezing hose water. Again, we dried ourselves in the shade.

Then we ran our fingers over each other's legs and said (with some bizarre upper class accent),

"Feel how luxuriantly soft your skin is!"

This was called, "Playing Spa." I can't decide if this was really sophisticated play or just plain torturing ourselves for no apparent reason. I've never been to a real spa, so I have no comparisons to make. Maybe going to a real spa is exactly like this experience. It has always stuck out in my mind as a weird memory, sitting in that mud hole together with the two other girls, whom I actually didn't know very well because they were Catholic and always had to go to Catechism whenever I wanted to play. Until I was about twenty, I generally thought that all Catholics spent all of their time either going to Catechism or digging gigantic holes in the ground.

We had another game that also used the hose. It was called, "Snake," and it involved running around an invisible obstacle course and avoiding getting bitten by the "snake", which was really just a hose. Then we would watch their dog eat snails off of the wood fence, which was also incredibly entertaining. I don't think these girls had any actual toys, but they were still lots of fun and most of the time I really wished they weren't Catholic and didn't always have to go to Catechism.

Eventually, their mom made us fill in the spa hole with dirt again. I thought she was pretty cool for letting us dig it in the first place.