Photo by bonita.applebum on Flickr, licensed under the Creative Commons.

We spray wherever we want and say whatever we want. The little metal ball clinking against the side of the cold can of spray paint breaks through the din of cricket sounds. Our hands, barely big enough to hold the can properly, dispel our message on the fading yellow slide. Our pseudo-gang signs littering the towering plastic structure towering tall on top of old mulch. The woods were forbidden. The older kids went in there and burned things. We never talked about why burning things was reason for alarm, but we did know they had built a tree house in the middle of the woods.

One day we snuck in past the felled trees and decaying stumps. We swatted at the mosquitoes that danced by our ears and tried to keep us out. We reached a clearing only to find a few slats of wood haphazardly held together. Dejectedly, we retreated weaving in and out of tall trees and slinking vines. With each faint slither of a snake we involuntarily sped up our gait. But no one was scared. We were taking over. The big kids were long gone. We were in charge.

We stood atop the concrete drain, the one with the rusty metal grating, in the middle of the field. There were creatures inside, but we weren’t scared. We fearlessly crossed the field, darting through the treeless expanse; it seemed like miles from the safe cover of the playground. This is where we all learned to ride a two-wheeler for the first time, this is where the heavy hand on our shoulder lifted slowly, lightly, trying to evade notice that we were now on our own, as we balanced precariously on only two narrow wheels. We peered inside the drain, but quickly and through slit eyes. We were in charge, but just in case, we didn’t want whatever lived in there to get any funny ideas.

It’s hard to say how long this went on. Each day was longer than the one before, we would stay out well into the thick, cool air of evening, and the kind-of-scary brink of dusk would persuade us back home.

The days would get shorter, as would our time. Eventually the summer ends, we go to school, start sports, do homework. We don’t assemble anymore, standing on top of the metal bike racks, daring fate to cause us to fall and crash against the cement. We didn’t snarl at our faces reflected in the puddles, just for practice, in case the bigger kids came back.

We were too busy to rebel; too tired by the time we got home after our day of working as a team and learning to solve problems. Teachers no longer seemed like enemies, and parents were suddenly useful. They could drive us places beyond the walking distance of the park.

We finish school and grow up, going through the years without really thinking about the playground. We’re too old to go there now; we don’t need the magic of the cement drain or the danger of the woods.

Our time is now spent researching, working, and trying to build a resume. We now understand what we deemed magic and mystery so many years ago.

So after so many years, today’s the day; we are meeting up, the graduates, some of us unlikely but others rather successful; funny how we eventually turned out all right. We walk the winding sidewalk edging the creek, bubbling with the rainwater from last night.

The basketball courts are gone. The cement has been scraped off and the metal posts uprooted. But the woods are still there. But they are so much smaller, so much less threatening. The tallest trees are bent with age and Spanish moss at the outskirts. They bow down to us, in a tired gesture of acknowledgment. As we round the corner, it’s plain to see that the playground is gone. There’s nothing there but mulch. The messages we left, hoping to make our mark, were gone, probably melted down into a new slide in some other neighborhood.

So there we sit atop a moldy wooden picnic table, former hooligans, ready to return to the place we once commanded, only to find that it has been leveled. It’s a painful sight, almost as if our memories are going to be erased along with the big Technicolor playground set. The swing set with the baby swings, the kind where there are two feet holes that we burned holes in with a stolen lighter—all demolished. We had painted, burned and generally destroyed the playground equipment, but we never wanted to see it go for good. If it were to be destroyed, we should have been the destroyers.

Sitting there, we barely knew what to say. But as we mourn our losses, there’s a familiar rustle in the dead leaves lining the floor of the woods.