Poems & Stories

Playground

There were two at the school, they called them the large and the small playgrounds. The large one was for the whole school with lots of different things to do but the small one was for the younger kids and the kindergarten room even had an outside door that led right to it. There was a circular jungle gym made of cold, grey metal, a swingset with with four swings, a teeter-totter that could lift you half-way up the sky until you said the right rhyme so your friend would let you back down, and animals that you could ride on which never ran far because you sat on them and they sat on springs stuck in the ground and only rocked side to side or front to back. Then one day the small playground disappeared. The equipment was gone. The school paved over the dirt and the grass and the small stones that had caught us when we jumped from the swings. Not a small playground anymore, now a small parking lot. When there was only one playground left, it meant the smaller one had gone, and the large one was not larger since it was alone. The little kids had to walk all around the building to the other side to get to the playground for recess breaks and back the whole way before recess was over. I think everyone missed the small playground. Probably even the kindergarten teacher did, though the outside door in her classroom now took her right to her car at the end of the day.