Back (yard) to the future
This morning is cool and calm, and I’m busy charging my cordless drills and collecting my socket wrenches.
When the kids were much smaller, about seven years ago, I decided to buy a playscape for the backyard. I had looked at all those kits you can buy at Walmart, made of untreated red-stained pine and cheap hardware, and quickly decided that there was NO WAY my kids were going to play on one of those flimsy things. So instead, I bought blueprints to make one from scratch – a large swingset/fort. I bought all the lumber and hardware, and set out to make the sturdiest combo swingset/fort money could buy. About four weeks later, with the help of a friend who had a drill-press, I completed the project.
Today, in about an hour the playscape will be coming down.
The backyard is in shambles: the lack of grass is causing soil erosion, the overgrown trees and playscape are preventing the grass to grow (leaving us with mud and weeds), and there is no place for our dog Harvey to lounge in grass to cool off. It’s an ugly mess, and while we all like the idea of our kids continuing to play in the fort and swing, it rarely happens anymore.
The kids, especially Rebecca, are a little sad. Lisa and I are a little sad, too. I like to think of myself as a pretty good self-diagnosing psychologist of sorts, and it seems to me we are mostly sad about loosing our memories, not the playscape. But really, our memories will always be with us as long as we like.
The upside to this melancholy event is that we are giving this playscape to a family of six young kids who truly really need it. The dad is coming over to help label joints and carefully disassemble the structure. We’ll place all the pieces in his rented trailer and he’ll haul it back to his family and reassemble it as a love offering to his kids.
Today is going to be a good day.
-D