Day 17

On playground duty today I walked around watching all the kids running about on the soccer field, others climbing the enormously tall climbing frame, and a little group of girls playing a made-up game which involved balancing precariously, legs far apart, on the wooden frame of the steps up to the slide, and leaping off to try and beat the line, scratched in the sand, of the best jumper.  I think it is a game which would have been stopped by any other teacher, but I am not that teacher.  They lined up patiently without anyone telling them to, and then when it was their turn, strove with their entire young bodies to spring off as high as possible, like pronking skinny young deer, ponytails bouncing and hair shining in the sunlight, joyful shouting laughter.

A girls' playground in Ohio a long time ago.

A British school playground

Hopscotch, a universal game

I remember the kind of dangerous excitement of going to the playground in Pinelands, we used to edge into it on our bikes on the way to somewhere else, slightly uncomfortable.  We would rush for the swings, swinging higher and higher, daring each other,  then, tiring suddenly of them, we would climb the steep and endless thin metal stairs of the high slide, shrieking inwardly as we let go of our hands to sweep down and land balanced on our two feet.  It was not "cool" to shout with excitement, or to fall on your bum at the bottom!  And then we were off again, never staying very long because it was a strange place, quite dark and foreboding, very secluded, tall pines everywhere, and there were sometimes teenagers behaving badly, smoking and swearing, scaring us.  And we were not actually supposed to go there, I can't remember why, but I seem to remember that it was a vaguely forbidden spot.

When I was nine months pregnant with Jess, my heaviest baby, (really heavy) who also made her entrance two weeks late, I was for some reason in a playground in East London with little Emma, nearly three.  She was very brave until she got right up on to the tall platform before the slide, but once she realized how she had to descend, where I was waiting, huge tummy and all, to catch her, she lost her nerve and refused to come down on the slide or by going back and using the steps.  After half an hour of cajoling, bribery, shouting, pleading, talking to both reasonably and unreasonably, I was forced to clamber up something like a rope-ladder looking like a clumsy fat penguin, in order to rescue her.  Once I had hefted myself up there I decided that the easiest way down was the slide, which we took, both shrieking with laughter and fear, a bountiful-bellied woman clutching her crazy white-blonde daughter to her, and then running the gamut of disapproving faces as we waddled back to the car.

Absence is hard to bear some days.  It is the nature of life and death, of course, and also our global society, but the acceptance of that fact doesn't make it any easier.  So here are my two little daughters who are now grown and far away with daughters of their own, but I have been writing about their smaller selves and feeling nostalgic for those little cherubs, so full of vivacious energy and dancing delight.