Like Springer, my younger sister Lauren and I were convinced that dinosaurs had to be fossilized in our backyard, specifically in our turtle shaped sandbox. We would dig and dig and dig and dig and if we found a rock that somehow got buried in there, we would run it up to the house, interrupt my mom or dad with whatever they were doing and hassle them to tell us whether we had indeed found a dinosaur or not. Of course, in order to not shatter our hopes and dreams and have to spend the rest of the evening counseling my sister and I through the pain of learning dinosaurs were certainly not buried in our sandbox, my parents would always tell us with a big grin on their faces, yes.
When I became a little older and grew out of the sandbox phase, a friend of mine from across the street and I started what we liked to call "the bunny hunters club". At our nightly meetings during the summer, we would set a "trap" in order to catch the bunny, which consisted of a cardboard box with a few baby carrots in it. We would then run up into my tree house and wait for a bunny to come along. We were never successful in actually "hunting" a bunny as we liked to call it, but we remained hopeful that one day we might actually get one.
One last childhood memory that Springer's book made me remember was the planting of a blue spruce with my grandpa when I was around five years old at his home in Holland Michigan. At the time that we planted the tree, it was smaller than I was. He told me then that when I was older, that tree would be much taller than I was. I didn't believe him. To this day, whenever I go to visit my grandmother's house, I look into the backyard and see the giant blue spruce that we planted. He was right. That tree is much much taller than I am now.
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