My ten-year-old son Cole and I bask in the impossibly brilliant afternoon, a 46-degree day interjected in between months of bitter snow and a spring that seems too far away to hope for yet.

We sit side by side on the ground, which is almost a little warm, but not quite, on the side of a hill, next to his newly constructed fort, legs stretched out in front of us, examining our hiking boots. Well, actually, he’s trying to crunch the toe of mine with his. But to no avail because I’m still bigger than he is. At least today.

Cole’s lost in a long and detailed explanation of how he built the fort out of all those pinon branches (and the benches from my dilapidated picnic table plus several miles of baling twine, and what all else is no doubt missing from my kitchen cabinets), but I’m only half listening. Instead I’m seeing unruly blonde hair the color of wheat, the delicate curve of a jaw that can harden into stubbornness if the mood strikes, well-shaped and generally unwashed ears beneath a camoflauge hunting cap, coal eyelashes that nearly brush his cheeks, dewy skin, eloquent, dimpled hands, all against this wild backdrop of god’s creation.

Not that I’m trying to imply that the boy’s an angel or anything.

His class just had an outing at the Natural History Museum. A sleepover, in fact. It doesn’t exactly take a genius to consider the sheer and massive potential for mischief in any program entitled Night at the Museum.

So, as a matter of basic physics and the laws of the nature of the universe and all that, my son and two of his fourth grade friends sneaked away from their sleeping bags and their snoring chaperone in the middle of the night to get a really good look at The Lava Exhibit. Can you imagine three grade school boys wielding flashlights and being left entirely up to their own devices in the wee hours near any kind of attraction containing the word l-a-v-a?

Well, luckily, nothing got broken—that wasn’t the intent of the uncontrollably curious—just thoroughly explored. I understand that a heart-pounding chase with a museum security guard ensued. Apparently that young man was as hot on those boys' tracks as the red molten lava from a live volcanoe.

At least that's the way Cole tells it. I bet he nearly peed his pants when the guard shouted, HEY YOU BOYS WHAT ARE YOU DOING IN THERE!, although he'd never fess up to such a thing. He may even have returned to school today as a fourth-grade legend. One of the heroes of The Lava Exhibit. A Night at the Museum maverick.

I can still see the look on his face when he realized I wasn’t mad. (One of his sister's friends grabbed me by the hand and told me everything in breathless, in-the-know glee almost the moment I walked into school, well before he had a chance to make his case.) And when I just laughed after his struggle to tell me exactly what happened at The Lava Exhibit--his sheepish, bordering on tears, face reddening, start and stop attempts to explain the who, what, when, where, and how of the incident--he laughed too, albeit, in a kind of relieved, whew, I’m so glad I’m not in deep dark trouble, kind of way. You could probably hear us giggling and then snorting, tears in my eyes, anyway, all the way across the school yard.

The only sound now is the wind in the pine needles. My little boy and I sit together in comfortable silence, until all too quickly the sun starts to sink over the mesa top. To my mild surprise, I find that I’ve been drawing circles in the dirt with a twig, and realize that if I put the two of them together, because they are nearly touching, I almost have drawn an eternity symbol, that flat figure eight, here in the earth at the root of the trees, at my ten-year-old's feet in his muddy boots.

As the pine tree shadows are lengthening and the air is getting cooler and cooler on my face, I find myself wishing that this day would last just a little bit longer. If that yellow orb would just retrace its tracks a few steps across the sky, that would be fine with me.

Because it hasn’t escaped me that my Cole's fort is built at the furthermost corner of the yard, butted right up against the barbed wire fence line of our property that borders thousands of acres of National Forest, way above the rocky arroyo that winds its way down to the Pecos River a few miles away.

Some sort of outpost, the kind that boys have been building since, you know, the dawn of time.

The adventures have just barely begun.