KIDS' PLAYGROUND CAN’T LAST FOREVER

It was just a pile of rubble—crumbling slabs of old concrete, mounds of peewee gravel—heaped together in a nearby vacant lot and overgrown by weeds.

Unsightly, yes.  But to my children, it was Camelot, the Emerald City or Neverland, depending on which day they happened to be embellishing its niches and crannies with cast-off bedding and worm-eaten 2X4’s.  

For the nine months since we had moved into our new home, one of the first in the subdivision, my brood had been free to inhabit whatever imaginative kingdom they chose, often wearing elaborate costumes they designed themselves.

Occasionally they even journeyed to Mars.  Other times they were pioneers trudging west to eat peanut butter and buffalo sandwiches on the cement blocks west of our home. 

Sometimes they just ran away with lunch packed in a suitcase.  That was okay.  They always returned in time to snuggle down in their own little beds.

But inevitably, the backhoe came.  I saw it rumbling in the lot while the children were at school.  Within 45 minutes, Camelot, Emerald City, and, most recently, Neverland had been heaped into a truck and trundled to the dump. (For a moment I considered asking the driver to deposit his load in our backyard, but somehow I knew such rubble would not enrich my husband’s garden.)

All day long I held my breath against the moment when the kids would see the barren scar where their magic habitat had been. Soon, I knew, a house would rise from footings newly dug and poured on the exact spot where Jennifer’s Peter Pan had escaped from Michael’s Captain Hook.

When Stacee, always the first one home, stood shoulder hunched beside the spot, I quietly hugged her skinny shoulders. We paused there together, silently surveying the damages, neither of us speaking until my daughter (aka Wendy) raised her trembling chin.

“It’s OK,” she finally said.  “Maybe Neverland will fit beneath our basement stairs.”

Often elaborate costumes were devised.