A Childhood Playground

Recently I joined a weekly creative writing group at the senior center in Holland and finished my second meeting this past Tuesday. This is a new experience for me and one that is already enriching my life. It is stretching me to write in new genres. There is value in the writing exercises, pleasure in hearing what others write and simple joy in doing something I love with others.

Each week we are given a word or two as prompts for our writing. Last week one of the words was “bullfrogs”. My immediate thoughts went to a favorite place of my childhood and I decided to share today what I wrote this week. It evoked a lot of childhood memories among those who were in the group on Tuesday. I hope it does the same for you.

Three-quarters of a century ago there was a magical place for me, a neighborhood formed by two streets, teeming with children, bounded on one side by an avenue and on the other by the entrance to a magical playground.

At the end of the upper street was we entered the special place where our adventures began. Walking down a slight slope and onto a winding sanding trail, we sometimes walked two abreast and at other times single file. If we paid attention we might see slithering garter snakes or scurrying field mice. At the right time of the year, there were buttercups and wild violets, and a variety of flowering weeds. Looking up and following the sounds, we spied birds we heard in the trees.

Although we were headed to a special place, we sometimes diverged from the path for a while to swing like Tarzan on wild grapevines that hung from climbable trees. Our destination was the end of the trail, the sights and sounds of the river with cattails and bullfrongs, and bloodsuckers that attached themselves to our legs and feet as we waded and splashed in the water of Black River. We had to examine each other to make sure the leeches were pulled off before going home.

My mother and the other mothers of my playmates were not always happy about our adventures. They worried about the poison ivy and poison sumac in the woods and what they considered human dangers in our playground. But we never saw the humans just the evidence they had spent time resting and eating in our shared space.

A block from the upper street were railroad tracks alongside a feedstore. Occasionally there were empty boxcars on those tracks and we played in them. I guess they were the mode of transportation for the hobos who had their camps in our playground. We didn’t mind sharing our space because they were never there when we were and what they left behind was sometimes of interest to us as we poked around in the remains of their campfires.

Although I have been carried back in memory to that neighborhood and playground, I can’t take you there to show it to you. It no longer exists. I the house I lived in on Columbia Avenue was between the Swift company ice cream factory and that of an old man with a wooden leg; we called his Peggy Mouw. Beyond his house lived his relative, Mrs. Mouw, who kept rabbits in a cage in her backyard. None of those places are there now. The houses on Fifth and Sixth streets are also gone. My neigborhood and playground were replaced by Windmill Island and Freedom Village.

I hope there are other magical places like those of my childhood where today’s children are building memories. I hope that one day when they reflect on memories of their childhood, they will not be of a playground in a video game but of places where living things are giving their imaginations space to run free./