Offering

It may be a girl thing, I'm not sure, but I remember well making small houses between gnarled tree roots using tiny pebbles for steps, moss for carpets with lichen roofs precariously supported by sprigs of dried bracken for walls. I would sometimes chance upon an eeny stick, no longer than my youngling fingers, with a lopsided Y at one end and a minute pock from a twig collar no longer sporting it's twig. That would be the eye and if I was really, really in luck there would be a minute horizontal split across the longer of the Y forks which would form the head of my miniscule imagined steed, the split forming the mouth in the muzzle~of course! :) I would gather him berries and dried grass, form a corral next to my lichen bracken house so we could have whispered goodnight when the stars appeared. I was never able to morph into a 3 inch high resident of the houses I designed but I spent many a summer dreaming in the woods.

I know I've lost you to snoring or frowning, sorry, but I was struck by the care, the obvious thoughtful decisions and evident concern that went into constructing this little protection, this rustic shelter assembled under a row of towering sheaves of bolted broccoli in a garden abandoned a few weeks ago by the other preschool that ends before I do.

I never see anything like this anymore. Playgrounds are routinized. The play is prescribed by the manufacturers, all to code, splinter free and in screaming primary colors. I am of course a fan of safety but there is an ugliness about playgrounds which I think serves to rob the souls of children.

Opportunities seem missing. There are no natural elements that cue one to imagine a slide to be a waterfall or a gangplank. My students are short, this is true, but, though tiny, they know that a Pirate ship wouldn't be made of plastic and that had they been, no Pirate would lower themselves to set sail on her.

Which made this secretly crafted, carefully placed hutlet almost like a shrine to fading childhood from the one last tyke that feels a kinship with something ineffable, something almost unrecoverable once you are taller than 3 feet. To provide a home for an offering to the happy spirits of childhood and imagination; sharing bent knee generosity to an unseen recipient unaware of and unbeknownst to it's benefactor. A slender bundle of dried grasses bound around by black yarn and patrolled by a ripe strawberry guard. It felt to me like a prayer, frankly. And I say Amen.