When Molly was young, she used Legos with her brothers. They constructed tidy villages or irrational towers out of the colored plastic bricks. This was in the olden days, before all the kits and specialized pieces. Before mini-figures.

Now she plays with her grandsons. They consume Lego sets on every occasion and whenever their allowances accumulate the purchase price. They are bright boys ages nine, seven and five. They acquire the sets and build them, once, per the instructions. After that the pieces are tossed into one of four large bins, to be used again and never reconstructed.

In the beginning, Molly tried playing Legos with her grandsons the way she had with her brothers. She selected bricks and started building. No sooner did her structure become interesting than an admiring boy would begin appropriating parts of it or restricting her access to similar parts. Molly’s a good sport, but she isn’t going to play long at an unfun game.

The main thing the grandsons want to do is wage war. They long to construct creatures and do battle. Maybe it’s a gender thing. Molly is not classically feminine, but she has no interest in fighting.

So began the mini-figure project.

Molly is an orderly person who has never minded a sorting job. She was searching for long bricks that morning, to add to the ranch house she was attempting to build, and five year old Finn was claiming the desired pieces as soon as she found them, when she turned her attention to torsos and heads. She pieced them together and looked for legs. She didn’t attempt to create matching, as-designed figures; at first she just pushed parts together to make them bigger and less likely to fall to the bottom of the bin. But then she got into the work: seeking out legs and snatching up accessories like little prizes.

She saw much disability. Some torsos were missing arms (nine year old Ollie told her the boys had been calling the arms “sleeves” and thought they could trade them, and then discovered after wholesale removal that only Ollie had the ability to replace them; Lorenzo and Finn just threw them into the bin (immediately or after a Mom-demanded floor cleanup), where of course they gravitated to the bottom). Many hands were gone, because Finn used to like to remove them with his teeth. The hands are so small that they were even more evasive than the arms, sometimes wedging into the underside of a brick where they had to be pried out with a Lego spear.

But Molly found arms for most of the torsos. She found helmets and hair and caps, weapons and horses and many sets of legs. She got into assembling a motley crew. Ollie was the first to join her, splitting his attention between figure-building and small-piece hoarding. He brought a plastic rack of drawers from his desk and spent some of his time sorting small pieces into them. Finn helped with the figure-building but also kept flying his Bionicle dragon around the air space, hoping for an opponent to battle. Seven year old Lorenzo acted as a true partner in Molly’s project. He brought over the biggest base plate he could find and began setting the completed figures on it in grid formation. He and Molly deemed a figure complete if it had head, torso, legs, and at least one arm, and then revisited some of the amputees as they found spare arms and hands.

“We have sixty-three, Grandma” was his first tally, after they’d been at the project for about an hour.

“Awesome, Lorenzo.”

“Let’s go for one hundred!”

“That’s a good goal. But it’s going to get harder now.” They’d gleaned pretty well from all the bins by then. They had to either take the trust-testing step of dumping a bin and “committing” to the consequent cleanup (Molly was too experienced with the boys to leap into that option), or start really raking the plastic pieces for the smallest, most elusive items at the bottom (they voted unanimously for that one, although Ollie and Lorenzo kept mentioning the dump alternative every time a minute or two passed without a find).

They continued to populate the base plate.

The four broke for lunch and then a parent-mandated walk and trip to the bookstore, but they returned to their project that evening and again the next day.

They assembled one hundred and kept at it.

Their grid became a bit disorderly due to crowding.

By the time the boys’ mother, Molly’s daughter-in-law Jill, joined them, there were one hundred thirteen characters on the base plate. “Some of the figures are missing arms,” Lorenzo told her. “And hands too!” came from young Finn.

“Well, people don’t need arms or hands or legs to be people,” she said. “What about Lefty? Or Wheelie Will?” The family is into punk culture, and many of their adult friends have been in horrific motorcycle accidents.

No one disagreed with Jill. But the boys and Molly knew you couldn’t make a mini-figure apparent on the base plate if it didn’t have legs. The figure can’t hold a weapon if it doesn’t have a hand. Lego hasn’t yet developed prostheses for its figures. Then again, Lego is all-prostheses already.

The boys called the project their Lego army. Molly referred to the assembly as a community. That’s probably another gender difference.