Generally speaking, I was a pretty good kid. I was mostly polite. Got good grades—even though, according to so many of my teachers, I wasn’t “living up to my potential.” Didn’t get into too much trouble.

I mean, I’m not saying I was perfect. I still regret not being nicer to my younger brothers and my sister. I teased them mercilessly—which at some point, I think, ceases to be “good-natured” and crosses the line into mistreatment.

I wasn’t particularly neat around the house or especially fastidious about washing my face and hands. I always seemed to have dirt plastered to some part of me.

Looking back on it, I should probably grant myself some grace when it comes to the dirt thing. I was a kid, after all.

Still, as an adult with dogs and my own kids, I now have a certain appreciation for my parents’ irritation with cleaning muddy footprints off the carpet. Which appreciation means I also now understand why my parents always seemed to be hollering at me to take my muddy shoes off before coming into the house.

Mud seemed like a constant in my life—a faceless character in the early chapters of the story of my childhood.

We had a creek through the end of our backyard. I say “creek,” which might be a bit of a topographical stretch. There was always at least a little bit of water that trickled through it, but you could jump across it most of the time without falling in. Unless we had any amount of rain. Then, the thing started to look like a scaled-down version of the Ohio River with a current and floating branches and old soda cans floating past. It wasn’t dangerous, really, but it did produce an unspeakable amount of mud along the banks. We loved it when the rain made the creek swell. We ran through it, splashed in it, stomped around in the puddles it left. And herein lay the problem at the heart of the ongoing quarrel with my parents over mud.

One day, we’d had a particularly heavy rain. And, of course, we were all out in the backyard, slopping around. But unfortunately, the rain had been so heavy that the banks on both sides of the creek were sodden. And with so many neighborhood kids stomping around, the usually grassy banks quickly turned to mud.

After a while, it got so bad that one kid got stuck. I don’t remember who. Like quicksand. He couldn’t pull his feet out of the mud. So a couple of us went to help him out. Nothing. Couldn’t budge him, no matter how hard we tried.

The only way we could get him out was by having him step out of his shoes. It soon dawned on those of us who’d gone to help him that we were quickly stuck just as fast. So, we all had to step out of our shoes and wade back through the mud in our sock feet.

The whole thing was pretty cool to a ten-year-old—in an Indiana-Jones-braving-the-wild-jungles sort of way. But it didn’t take long for reality to sink in: I was going to be in big trouble. Full of mud. No shoes.

And I was right. My mom was not happy when I came struggling up the back lawn, dragging my now-mud-caked tube socks into the garage … with no shoes.

You can probably imagine how that conversation went. “What have I told you about playing in the mud, coming in here all dirty? Do you think I spend my days trying to figure out new ways to clean up after you? And where are your shoes?”

“Um, in the backyard.”

“Well, go get them.”

“See, that’s the problem. They’re stuck in the mud.”

“Those were brand new tennis shoes! Wait till your father hears about this.”

When my dad finally did “hear about this,” he was even less sympathetic than my mom. “What were you doing playing in the mud? We’ve told you about this. Stomping around in those muddy shoes, bringing all that mess into the house.”

Now, I’m not sure why I thought my next response was smart. Not sure why I thought introducing a little levity into the situation would help my cause. But, as is my custom, I couldn’t help myself. Beaming, I said, “Well, at least I didn’t bring my muddy shoes into the house.”