the playing place

While working on my author brother's website, I once again read a short story that he wrote for an english class a while ago. This piece tugs at my heart strings and leaves me nostalgic for the "good old days" of childhood. It is from his point of view, written by him, but I too was involved with the playing place - playing and building there even before he was able to walk. Reading this and remembering my childhood makes me sad to have to grow up. It also makes me ask myself, how can I nurture the child still in me now? What am I doing in my life right now to continue building the playing places?

Here is the article.

The Playing Place
--by Hiram Webb, aka AAK Bresh

I grew up in the richest neighborhood in town. My parents called it Hidden Meadows. It was located forty-five minutes form the nearest paved road, and power was a thing provided on necessity by a gas generator. Highlights were canoeing on the lower fields when they flooded in the spring time, and turning out all the lights in the house on Saturday night so that the popcorn popper with its heavy energy draw would not deplete the limited supply. Being young at the time, I narrowly escaped the horrors that my older siblings found in tending our massive garden plots. I was born late enough to escape the hours of poverty where they had nothing to eat but mashed potatoes and strawberries (which they ate together and to disastrous results). Thankfully, I was not too young to experience the making of our first "playing place". Such was the simple name which spring from childhood. The first I remember of the playing place was damming the tiny creek which ran past our house in the spring time, and building bridges over it and roads along it for our toy trucks to drive on. We spent hours there, building and rebuilding, damming and breaking dams. The playing place was like a sand box, except for two things. We would never bend so low as to use unwieldy and uncooperative sand above dirt and clay, and unlike the sand box, our playing place had no walls - no boarders.

When I was six years old, we left Hidden Meadows and moved into town. Suddenly we were a ten minute's drive from the nearest grocery store, and though we still lived in the country with a river on our front door step and a creek at the back, we now had power, running water - even a television, though no signal would ever enter the coils of our ancient brute. VHS was the name of the game. As everything else took a step up in technology, so did our playing place. In the past we had built it quite concentrated, and it never lasted long before someone broke it all up and redid it. This time we chose a wide hillside to build it on, and the roads wound out further and further, now a permanent fixture in the landscape. We had a town with a main street, and country roads which led nowhere in particular. We had power lines, at some points, and my brother set up a credit system with pinecones so that we could buy land from each other. Happily, that did not last long and soon land was free for the taking again. That was the grandest playing place I ever saw. I had a great farm there, stretching over two hundred square feet, on which I grew clumps of quack grass.

That only lasted for five years, though, and then we were moved again. This time we were right in town. The real main street was visible form our house, and for the first time in my life I did not live on a farm, or even in our own house. We were renters. But that did not stop us from following our tradition. We chose the unused hill behind the house, and began filling it with roads once again. For the first time, we experienced the joys of building on hillsides and being careful where we stepped so as not to break our roads out. We lined them with logs to hold the dirt in place, and continued to build with all the enthusiasm we could muster, going before the snow was even melted in the spring to shovel it aside, break up the frozen ground, and plow clean our roads so that our trucks could drive again. By this time, the name playing place was beginning to sound foolish, but with nothing better to call it, we continued the tradition.

And then came the move out of town. My mother had taken enough. She said the town life was getting to us, that our friends were being bad influences on us. Two years after we moved there, we left, moving back out of town. Once again we were on a farm. One of the first things we did was build a new playing place, set on a mound of dirt dug out for the foundation for the new addition to the house. We battled weeds and rocks and laid our roads until they were permanent fixtures in the hill. This was the last playing place I would build. By this time I was outgrowing it. I had discovered the wonderful world of society, school, and video games, and leisure time became scarce. I still went to the playing place on occasion, but not nearly as much.

Today, the playing place is still there, waiting for another generation to discover its joys. My two youngest siblings and their friends, who have never been able to experience the tradition, opted for the sand hill rather then the playing place, and though we tried to correct what we saw as a mistake, they chose sand over dirt anyway. The playing place sits vacated except for one strip of dirt where someone took a hoe to one road in a futile attempt to clear away the weeds. Most of the roads would support a grass fire far sooner then any vehicle, and the 'lakeshore lodge' which we built around a dry hole in the ground now lays under the foundations of a new road we had to build for hauling wood. I am sure I will build many more playing places, down through the years in my life, but they will have to be all in my mind. They will all be unique, adapting to fit the different places I find myself in, but they will never again have the splendor or the innocence of my first four.