The Park

All the kids around here think of the Cambridge Elementary School playground as "the park."  I've had precious times with my four grandchildren there, especially when they were pre-schoolers.

When you take one child at a time, they are instantly attracted to other kids their age, and they start up games without even knowing each other's names.

Yesterday, Elena found a little girl named Kemp, and the job of Yenna and Kemp's daddy was to call out animals and they became those animals, moving toward the butterfly jumping like a frog, then a rabbit, then walking like a penguin, all the way to the butterfly.

The butterfly is a memorial to a Cambridge student who died a few years ago.  There's no telling how many living children have sat on that butterfly-wing bench without even knowing its story.

In a year, the playground is being demolished for parking spaces, a smaller playground to be built on the grounds of the school.  For so many years, the school-children have crossed the street in colorful rows from the school to the playground and I love to stop in my car and watch them skipping and dancing across the street in lines with their teachers.   Now, crossing the street has been deemed a safety violation and the powers that be want the playground and the school on one side of the street.

But for one more year, we get to enjoy the big sprawling playground where the bigger boys play basketball and the little kids crawl, balance, slide down poles, swing, build rock volcanos, and feed the birds leftover pizza.

Kemp's daddy and I watched as two little girls moved nonstop for an hour.  If we only had that energy! we said.

Little people are like little butterflies, moving in streaks, landing on one thing, then another, soaring, this minute, this day, everything.