5 year-old Mark has hard summer in basement

The summer my oldest son was 5, we dug, one shovelful at a time, a basement under our existing home. In June we had a digging party for my teenage stepson’s friends. The guys went downstairs with their shovels. The 5-year-old found an extra shovel and tagged along to help the big boys.
He as just in the way: In the way when the big boys pushed a shovel into the dirt, in the way when they carried the shovel full of dirt to the elevator and painfully in the way when they turned to swing their shovel up to the dirt elevator.
He came upstairs with a bleeding forehead. I asked a friend to stay with the others wile I dashed him to the clinic for stitches. Afterwards my son was exiled from the basement digging project.
By late August we were ready to pour the cement floor. My husband asked family and friends to come and help the day we poured the cement. The volunteers were on time.
The cement was late. All the volunteers, except my husband’s retired parents, had to leave before the cement was smoothed into a floor. I looked at the yards of lumpy cement, grabbed a trowel and taught myself how to finish cement.
By 8 o’clock we were done. I invited my in-laws to stay and eat. We sat down to a meal of garden fresh green beans, potatoes and chicken. Grandpa was so tired his hand shook as he served my 5-year-old from the bowl of steaming hot green beans he held. Scalding hot, bean juice sloshed onto the child’s left leg. He screamed.
I jerked him out of his chair, yanked his jeans and found a plastic bag of frozen peas to use as an ice pack to cool his leg. Only then did I calm down enough to assess the fiery red skin.
I called the clinic and described the burn, asking for burn ointment. The nurse said, “You better bring him in.” At the clinic she took one look and said, “it’s a good thing you came. These burns get worse with time.”
Hot water burns must be a bit too common during late summer’s canning season. The doctor entered the room asking, “Did you get in the way of your mother’s canning?” As my son cried, the doctor cleaned and swathed his thigh in gauze and sent us home with pain pills. Supper was over. The table was cleared. His grandparents were waiting to see that he was okay.
I assured them everything would be all right. Their 5-year-old grandson had a small burn on the calf f his leg and a larger one on his thigh. They watched as I gave him a pain pill and ice cream cone. By the time the ice cream was gone, he declared, “it doesn’t hurt anymore. The ice cream made it better.”
That and the pain pill.
After a couple days of bandage changes, he began to question the healing powers of ice cream. However by the time he started kindergarten, the worst of the healing process was over. His first day of school he sported a thin small scar on his forehead and long pants to keep his bandage clean.
In time his scars and my memory of that summer faded. Almost.