IT TURNED OUT what Mary Virginia wanted was not really a new friend, but a weekly dose of rough-and-tumble for her boys.

“You don’t do churchy things on Tuesdays, do you?” she’d asked at my house the next week. “What do Presbyterians have? Prayer meetings? Covered-dish suppers?” She’d waved a hand in the air vaguely, as if mainstream churches were beyond her with their confusing ways. Episcopalians were like that. I wondered if Lila Beth had minded dreadfully when her son went over to his wife’s church. Decided it had broken her heart.

“Tuesdays are fine,” I said.

“My mother and sister got me in this exercise class up in Dallas—they live up there, in the Park Cities part—and it’s practically hereditary, getting in. Someone practically has to die. It’s fabulous; I never miss it. It only takes me two hours door-to-door, less if I go early.” She’d got down on the polished floor of the parsonage and demonstrated an impossible posture, hands on the floor, chest up, chin out, one leg crossing the other in the back, then kicked toward the sky. “Amazing for the thighs,” she said, smoothing her cuffed, belted shorts, worn no doubt because the parsonage had ceiling fans but no air conditioning. “Then we have lunch and shop. It’s the only time I get to see them. It’s my one day in Dallas, and wild horses couldn’t keep me away.”

I told her that trading days was a wonderful idea. And after my initial disappointment at seeing I was not to be her new friend, I saw that it was. It meant no more worrying about what mine were going to do to hers. No more watching while my Tonka truckers tore blocks and push toys and moving vehicles from the hands of her mild-mannered boys. That would now be a problem for her all-purpose Swede.

I knew having them here all on my own, the four of them, would be grand. Would be cake. Because I knew that she might have all the equipment of an amusement park on the patio of her enormous place, but that I knew the secret of short people: they loved to move.

So once a week from that spring until the youngest of them, Martha and Jock, started kindergarten, I had Play School at the parsonage every Tuesday from seven-thirty in the morning to five-thirty in the evening. Then on Thursdays, I left mine at Mary Virginia’s from nine until seven, so that Eben and I could have some time alone before the weekend, which was always hectic and public.

My days with the four children were wonderful days. The best of the best. The first thing I did was move everything out of the way, the bench sofa and cane-bottom chairs and the long trestle dining table. Then I put Arlo Guthrie on the turntable, the same record every time, and we all held hands in a circle and danced up and down over and over to “Ring Around the Rosy Rag.” It would have made sense to make a tape of it, but I had no player. Besides, it seemed part of the ceremony to get to the end, sagging and gasping, and then put the needle back at the start, with all of them giggling, and dance through it all over again.

We developed little routines: a kick with the left foot here and a kick with the right there. Sometimes we kept our feet on the floor and bounced up and down, and once, when the music was just right for it, we dropped hands and turned all the way around, catching hands on the next note. They loved it. They never got tired of it. They probably—as is the way with babies of two and three—could have repeated it for the whole ten hours. But when we’d done it four times through, we stopped, all sat down on the floor, and had the first of zillions of tea parties. This one being cocoa, because it was still breakfast time for them. (In fact, the boys were often delivered in their robes and jamas—imagine small persons owning robes and piped pajamas, with buttons and belts all extant and in place!—with a change of clothes packed in their little campers’ backpacks.) I tried to see to it that every wild routine was followed by some refreshment that would have been impossible in their, the boys’, carpeted spotless universe.

Sometimes we played our own version of tag, a sort of “thimble, thimble, who’s got the thimble.” For this one they stood with their hands behind their backs and their eyes closed, and I put something tiny in the palm of one of them. Then everybody ran around and tried to guess who it was. It was too silly and they all knew at once because of the closed tight fist and erupting shrieks, but there was always a lot of suspense while they waited to see who got it. And once in a while I fooled them and tucked a piece of bubble gum into every hand, and that was an irresistible joke causing them to laugh so hard they fell into a heap on the floor. Or we had musical chairs, lining up four little cane-bottoms that my children had with a small wooden table in those days.

After lunch, which was always sticky, squashy peanut butter and banana sandwiches, we had run-and-touch. In this game they lined up in a row, with their feet all exactly even, which took a lot of pushing and shoving and squealing about who was out of line, and usually one or all of them had to stop and go to the bathroom, and then we’d have to start all over again. By this time I was a heap on the sofa, my feet propped up on its curved arm, and I’d call out the name of some spot or piece of furniture and they would all run to it, to see who could touch it first. “Front door.” “Big table.” “My tummy.” “Fridge.” “Back door.” “My feet.” It didn’t matter what it was as long as the object wasn’t something likely to be destroyed when the four of them ran the length of the house and crashed into it.

We ended, the last thing in the afternoon, after their naps on mats on the floor, with nice totally indelible grape Popsicles which could drop and melt and mess all over the place. For this we sat back in our circle, on sheets of newspaper, with bibs made of ScotTowels pinned on with paper clips. And everybody laughed when everybody else grew fat purple lips and mustaches.

Why was that all so wonderful?

Maybe because my life, already beginning to stretch the tightly fitted skin of the preacher’s wife, felt ground-bound and constrained, every muscle longing to peel out and let go.

Or maybe I simply wished that I were one of those babies, holding hands, bouncing in place, doing “Ring Around the Rosy Rag,” over and over and over again.