I spent a while ysterday afternoon, after I finished my book, staring wistfully at an empty spot in our yard:
It’s not just the inability to grow grass there— it’s not actually significantly worse than the rest of the yard in that respect. It’s that a few days earlier, it looked like this:
That’s The Pip, burning off energy on his last day of mandatory Covid isolation by swinging on the wooden playset that occupied that space for almost ten years. I could probably get the exact date out of my email, but I’m pretty sure it was installed in August of 2012, right around SteelyKid’s fourth birthday.
SteelyKid is a teenager now, and The Pip a tween, and they both mostly outgrew the playset a few years ago. They would occasionally swing on it if we were outside for some other reason, or climb up to the platform to claim the high ground in a snowball fight, but it had gotten to be a tight squeeze. The Pip had trouble keeping his feet from dragging when he went on that last swing, and SteelyKid’s got a couple inches on him still.
It looks pretty weathered in that photo, but it really just needs power-washing and a new coat of stain, something I did a few years back, but didn’t bother with last summer because the kids weren’t using it. That’s solid redwood framing, and it’s got several more years of life in it yet. So we offered it up at work, and a couple from Union whose kids are closer to the age of ours when we originally got the playset came yesterday and carted it off to reassamble it in their yard. I was a little surprised at how quickly it came apart— it wasn’t much more than an hour all told to get it out of the yard. Ten years of memories don’t weigh all that much, after all…
It was kind of a fitting day for this operation, as The Pip’s fifth-grade class spent a chunk of the day visiting the middle school they’ll be attending next year (his review: “It’s pretty big.”) Today they’ll be off at a local park for the “Friendship Games” event bringing them together with their age cohort from the other elementary school that feeds into the same middle school. He’s a sporty Little Dude, so he’s very fired up for this— when I woke him up this morning, he declared “I’m ready to crush Hillside at the Friendship Games,” which might not quite be the right spirit, but, you know, I like the enthusiasm.
It’s the end of an era for SteelyKid as well, who’s wrapping up eighth grade at that middle school, and will start at the high school next year. I realized the other day that while they spent The Pip’s first three years of school riding the bus together to the same school, that will only happen one more time, when SteelyKid’s a senior and The Pip is a freshman.
The playset is just the latest and largest in a series of kid-stuff giveaways that have been going on for a few years now. There was a plastic play house in the back yard that we gave to someone else a while back, and a huge number of toys and games have gone in bags to the community center that the college supports in Schenectady. Those have mostly been out of sight, though, where the wooden playset has been a strikingly visible feature of our back yard for the last decade. It was the right time for it to go, but it feels weird to look out from the kitchen or the deck and just see patchy grass there.
After all, in a part of my mind, it’s forever going to look like this:
This is inevitably going to read as a comment of sorts on yesterday’s horrific shooting in a Texas elementary school, and I guess that kind of makes it one, but I swear it didn’t start out that way. I was writing this in my head well before I heard that news. This is just me being a sappy, aging Dad, confronted with more-visible-than-usual evidence of the inexorable march of time.
Anyway, I’m not usually this sentimental, but if you’d like to catch the next time it happens, here’s a button:
I will leave the comments open as usual, but with a warning: I mentioned yesterday’s shooting only to pre-empt the obvious comment. I am not the slightest bit interested in providing a platform for anybody else’s views on guns, school shootings, or the state of Texas right now. If you want to talk about the passage of time and/or how cute my kids are, have at it. If you want to yell about politics, well, it’s a big Internet, and there are plenty of other parts of it where people who aren’t me will indulge you in that.
that day is coming for me too...