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One of my first memories of childhood is meeting a neighbor, a child the same age as I was, three and a half. The shared interest, the common obession that drew us together, was Tonka trucks. Over the next few years, my friend and I would dig, haul, remove, replace, disturb, and transfer vast quantities of earth. Even after we started school, the summers were spent making truck sounds and childishly believing we were the drivers of massive earth-moving vechicles. Returning home for a visit thirty years later, I could detect evidence of our work in the subtle grooves and mounds still contouring parts of my parents’ yard. I found one of my favorite Tonka trucks in the basement and a whole world that had been lost came back in a rush, a world so familiar that I had passed it over for years. I have now returned to the digging, hauling, and fantasies that these trucks gave me as a child, the satisfactions are different now, clearer.