Mud Balls Were Our Currency

Whenever word spread through the community that a new well was being dug, children between five and ten years old descended on it like a gold rush — except the gold was free, and it belonged to whoever arrived first.

The wells in our community were approximately six feet wide, hand-dug by three or four laborers over the course of about a week, reaching underground water at fifteen to twenty feet below the surface. What came out of the earth beyond the first five or eight feet was extraordinary. That soil was unlike anything you could buy or find on the surface. Soft but not quite soft. Gentle under your fingers but with a resistance that held its shape. Something close to gel — dense and yielding at once — except it would never evaporate, never dry out too quickly, never betray what you were trying to make. You could feel it responding to your hands. Whatever your imagination decided, the mud would attempt. A ball. A figure. A wall. A world. The material asked only one thing of you — that you knew what you wanted. The rest it would do.

We made mud balls.

The standard size was roughly one inch in diameter — small enough to fit perfectly in a child’s palm, large enough to carry real weight when thrown. To make a proper one, you took a handful of that deep earth, added just enough water to make it yield, worked it between your palms until it became dense and smooth, then set it in the sun for several days. The test of quality was simple and unforgiving — you threw it as hard as you could with your bare hand. Not with a slingshot. With your hand. If it survived, it was a good ball. If it cracked, you started again.

The test of quality was simple and unforgiving.

Mud balls had two purposes in our world, and both of them mattered enormously.

The first was practical. We used them as ammunition for the slingshots we carried everywhere — not against each other, but for hunting birds after school. I never successfully shot a bird. Not once. I had what I believed were considerable aiming skills. The birds remained unconvinced.

The second purpose was more serious.

Mud balls were our currency.

Toys cost money that most of us didn’t have. So we played with what we could make, and what we made became what we valued. The game itself was simple in concept and genuinely difficult in execution — mud balls arranged in pairs along a line, players taking turns shooting from at least six feet away, winning whatever pairs your ball reached or displaced. It required balance, precision, judgment of distance and force. Some children were extraordinary at it. They carried their collections in small wooden or iron boxes, hundreds of balls accumulated through skill and patience.

Occasionally adults would approach the best makers with real money — ten to fifty cents for a hundred or two hundred balls. They wanted them for the same reason we did. Slingshots. Bird hunting was not just a children’s pastime in our community. Adults practiced it too, with more serious equipment and presumably better results than my own record suggested was possible. The best mud balls — dense, perfectly round, sun-cured to an almost ceramic hardness — were genuinely superior ammunition. For a moment, our child-made currency crossed into the adult world and held its value there. That always seemed important somehow, though I couldn’t have explained why at the time.

I never sold a single one — partly because I never had enough worth selling. The honest truth is that I was not gifted at making mud balls. Most of mine came out small and misshapen, lopsided in ways that resisted explanation, a texture and appearance that the other children described, without particular kindness, as resembling chicken droppings. I was perhaps too young to have fully mastered the art. My maximum collection at any one time reached maybe a hundred balls — a modest sum by the standards of our economy, far below what the serious players accumulated. I was not poor exactly. But I was not wealthy either. I existed somewhere near the bottom of the mud ball middle class, which is perhaps the most honest place to observe any economy from.

The size of your collection was your standing. We understood this without discussing it. Children with full boxes were treated with a particular kind of respect — not formally, not consciously, but it was there. It is funny to think about now. It was not funny then. It was simply the order of things.

What I remember most clearly is this — we never stole. Not even after a significant loss. And losing was not nothing. When you lost badly, the feeling followed you home. You lay awake thinking about exactly where your throw went wrong, which pair you should have aimed for, how you had misjudged the distance or released too early. You practiced in the yard the next morning before school, alone, throwing against nothing, adjusting. You came back to the next game with a specific and private intention. There was no bitterness toward the person who beat you. Just a quiet determination to understand what they understood that you did not yet. You went home. You practiced. You came back.

The guardians came for us at moonlight — most of them carrying sticks of various sizes, less for punishment than for the reassurance of having something to wave. We went home. We counted our collections before sleeping. We planned the next day.

Decades later, I think about those mud balls more than seems reasonable.

We made them from almost nothing — earth, water, sunlight, time. We lost them without stealing. We lost them without lying. We went home and practiced and came back the next day.

What if the currencies we use now — dollars, euro, baht, yuan — are just mud balls?

The difference, maybe, is that we were better at losing gracefully when we were eight.