I have not visited our building site this week.

The process of rebuilding our home, destroyed by fire in August 2025, has been slow. But finally, there’s momentum.

Watching it take shape is strangely mesmerizing. The roof appeared where there had been open sky. Wires run through the studs to light switches I expect to one day turn on and off.

When I stand in the middle of what will eventually be the kitchen, I try to imagine cooking dinner and laughing with family and friends.

The rebuilding process has reminded me of something I loved doing when I was 10 years old.

Back then, I loved to play basketball, read and ride my bike with friends. We rode with purpose, convinced it was our responsibility to explore the homes being built on our side of the highway.

With no permission whatsoever, my friends and I kept tabs on every house under construction within a 2-mile radius of my home.

Next week, I’ll be sure to go check on the progress of the house. This week simply held too many decisions, with every free minute outside of work spent deciding about tile, appliances or countertops.

Looking back now, and knowing a bit more about the responsibilities that come with adulthood, I’m fairly certain my friends and I spent more time in the skeletons of those homes than the people who would eventually live there.

To this day, I remember the layouts of many of those houses — and the awe we felt walking through and discovering things like sunken living rooms or second-floor balconies. There was something magical about wandering through unfinished spaces and trying to imagine what they would eventually become.

Standing inside our own building site these days feels a lot like those afternoons, when I tried to picture what a house was going to look like someday.

Maybe that’s why I’ve been thinking lately about something Mr. Rogers once wrote: “It’s very important, no matter what you may do professionally, to keep alive some of the healthy interests of your youth. Children’s play is not just kids’ stuff. Children’s play is rather the stuff of most future inventions.”

That idea stuck with me. So I asked a few folks in the newsroom a simple question: What did you love to do when you were 10 years old?

Design director Jay Martin, who is about my age, said he spent a lot of time riding his bike to construction sites around his Forest Oaks neighborhood off North Sherwood in Baton Rouge.

At first his neighborhood was surrounded by woods, but when houses started going up, he and his friends found plenty of scrap wood for building elaborate forts and treehouses.

“We even had carpet at one point,” he said.

With every answer, a little Tom Sawyer spirit appeared.

Kay Gervais, news editor, said she loved going pirogue-ing with her best friend, Amie Bourgeois, in a canal behind her home near Raceland.

“Our canal led to Bayou Lafourche,” she said. “The water was a much more expansive playground than our bikes.”

Matthew Albright, state politics editor, said he spent much of his 10th year reading Brian Jacques’ “Redwall” series.

“I got so totally absorbed in them that my parents would have to physically come grab me to get me to eat dinner,” he said.

Jennifer Brown, senior editor, said she spent time on her bike when she was 10.

“The freedom of being on my bike …” she said.

I love imagining the 10-year-old versions of my co-workers — seeing little glimpses of them in the adults they became.

And I think about the 10-year-old version of me, wandering from one half-built house in Forest, Mississippi, to the next, studying staircases and room layouts as if it were the most important work in the world.

Turns out that little girl was paying attention to details that would come in handy decades later. Standing in the middle of our own unfinished house now, I find myself grateful for that curious child — and for the reminder this week that play is rarely just play.

It’s almost always about building something else down the road.

What about you? What did your 10-year-old self love to do? What absorbed you so completely that time disappeared?

Email Louisiana Culture Editor Jan Risher at jan.risher@theadvocate.com.