I. Reflections on the edge of the softball field at West Ridge

. . .

I need my glasses to see the trees against the night sky. They're fuzzy variegated masses that blur into the glowing clouds, but through the glasses, they're striking black silhouettes with razor edges dividing light from dark.

II. Afterthoughts

The edges, of course, aren't really edges; they're the trees and the sky. Or, rather, they're me telling tree from sky. Amazing, how an artist can take a whole tree and a whole sky and give you both with just a winding line on a canvas. In that line (and perhaps a few more) are tree and sky and place and time, as real as the trees at West Ridge now.

I remember the evergreen by the cul-de-sac; it wasn't a big tree. It was a big deal to retrieve a ball that rolled under it. I can walk under that tree now. I look up at that tree, and I know it has grown with me for at least the past fifteen years. It is amazing. The lower branches have been cut off to keep the kids from climbing them, or to keep them from breaking off, or some admixture of themes thereof. I can walk at full height under it with plenty of clearance. There's a patch of dirt around the trunk. I hope the tree gets treated well. Near the tree is a geodesic dome jungle gym. Used to be a wooden merry-go-round there. (Hell of a merry-go-round, too, though a real drag when the rut around it filled with water and mud after rain.) Behind the merry-go-round, going back toward the school, there was the big (kid scale) slide. And beyond that, if memory serves, the see-saws, a low swingset, a small slide in there somewhere, and then the big swings.

Oh, the big swings. Such mastery we thought we had of those. Such fun: power-boosting to maximum height, where the chains go slack and you feel no gravity until you fall enough for the chains to yank you back on the swing path, and flying off forward in that big free fall, hoping the ground isn't hard and you can hit just a little farther out than everyone else. Trying to get your favorite swing every day. Occasionally doing the daredevil tricks like reversing directions in mid-swing or dropping out at the apex of the backswing, an impressive feat but one which only dropped you straight down, not forward and away. Geronimo! And, on less energetic days, just swinging side to side and slamming into each other, or grabbing each others' chains and synchronizing one big sideswing, or twisting the chains as tight as they'd go and spinning like mad. I always tried to face in one direction and trace a circular path, but it never seemed to work. I am still pondering the physics of that.

But now, the big slide and the little slide and the see-saws are gone. The swingsets are right next to each other (and still, thankfully, have the black rubber strap seats), and between them and the geodesic dome thing, there are strange jungle gym/workout-centerish constructions of wood beams, tires, metal bars, and, on one unfriendly-looking thing, chains. I don't know what to think of them, and I don't know what they do to the children. Maybe they're better. Maybe kids raised with these things in their recess time develop a more stable psychological foundation and can better handle things like divorced parents and high school. Maybe I'm just filled with nostalgia and these kids will be too and they'll make the same complaints when the next generation gets a playgroundful of ecologically sound organic polymer natural learning challenge stations designed by developmental psychologists and ergonometric engineers. I just hope they keep the swings.

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