In my hand rests a particularly-pitiful looking pinecone. For the past 12 years it has resided in a plastic baggie with a little note that reads, "Kevin and I kicked this pinecone 153 times between our house and the gate that led to the hayfield."

My mind went back to the days I schemed to get my youngest son outdoors. If unsupervised during school breaks or summer vacation, he'd connect with a computer for ten hours non-stop. In his mind, exercise was a mad dash outside to run around the house three times - my stipulation for every hour he spent staring at a screen.

Because he was in that adolescent-gains-weight stage and I was pinching more than an inch around my middle, we made a pact. We would walk or bike somewhere every other day together, wherever he wanted to go. Sometimes it was down to the bluffs behind the barn; other times, we'd go to the back pasture where the cows used to roam. The day of the pine-cone incident, we were near the barn and tractor shed when he grabbed my hand.

"C'mon, Mom. I want to show you my secret route."

I really needed to go back and start supper, but something in his eyes changed my mind. In the barn, I watched my ten-year-old son scramble to the top of a hay stack. From there, he made his way across the upper loft and crossed a wooden plank resting across two old stalls. He invited me to join him.

"Up there?" I whined.

"Yeah, this is part of the secret route."

I begged off, recounting my last chiropractic appointment and ending up with what I thought his Dad would say if I broke my neck in the barn. My ruse worked, but the spoil-sport victory I gained wasn't a proud moment.

"Well," he turned around, "at least you can do this!" He swung himself down onto a large hayrack and picked his way across the open slats to the end, then dropped to the ground.

"It's messy out there," I sniffed.

"You won't get dirty, Mom. Just follow me, okay?"

I lifted one blue-jean leg and had managed to hoist it over the top rail when he hollered, "Just jump down and grab that hammer by the barn gate, okay? We need to fix this nail that's sticking out."

Just jump down. Sounded simple, but the leg committed to the adventure was arguing with the leg that lagged behind. Just-jumping down was no easy task. Was the hammer absolutely necessary? He pointed to some blood on his knee.

"I don't want anybody else to get scratched."

The hammer was only ten feet away and mothers are supposed

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