I, as I am today (fat, breathless, with limited mobility, in both action and duration) was in Burke Park, here in my hometown -- where I grew up and to where I have returned.
There was some type of family gathering, of a sort, but not an event. May have even been coincidental. As I came around the curve at the bottom of the hill from the tennis courts, I spotted Rita and Jeanie and others. Not sure of all -- Chip and David were spotted, and David's grandkids, and several others, nieces and nephews, and maybe some cousins.
I waved at my sisters and they waved back.
I had got to where the sidewalk goes up to the old school (I remember when that was the new school!)
I was inspired and I started jogging up that sidewalk. Jogging, and then I even managed to burst into an actual run, then I was at the top.
The former playground spread before me. The school building, with that odd corner thing, was to my right. The area was paved -- old pavement, but well kept. Crumbling edges, but the edges had been weed-whipped.
In the exact middle of this area was a concrete slab where the monkey bars, slide, and swings had been when I attended. The merry-go-round (if there was one then; I don't remember) had been a distance from the others. The slab where those things had stood looked the same, except there were round places where the poles that rooted the equipment had been. Not holes -- the holes had long ago been filled in with newer concrete. If there had ever been a layer smoothed over it all to make it even, that layer had worn away except where the holes had been.
The concrete pad was a clear rectangle of shape and I decided to run the perimeter of that before finishing my lap around the playground and back down to the park where there was paved roadway that I have never in my life seen used. The park end has always been blocked by pillars. (I'm not telling you how long that's been -- it's a ridiculous amount of time. If you know me, you know enough.)
I trotted/jogged around the rectangle, but didn't go down the closed roadway. My amazed family was all coming from the park up beside the shelter house, and where the caretaker's house had been before it wasn't.
So, we met in the road that winds between the school buildings and the baseball park.
"Did you see me? I ran! I was running!" I wasn't even breathless, and oh, that brief run had been fantabulous! It has been so long! Even the jog-trot had been exhilarating, but OH, that RUN!
They were all cheering and congratulating me and wishing they could get that lucky, and we all -- well, all who had come from the park -- started walking from Fossyl Drive to South Street while a bunch of us chattered away, talking over one another, about how I had been running; actually running, and I described how it had felt.
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When we got home and was telling our mother about it, she told us she had once dropped "some things" into those pole holes before they filled them in. And that was that.
Rita and I were trying to figure out how to dig them up or out, because we were curious as to what the items were and when she had buried them in the playground graves.
We couldn't ask her, because she wasn't there to ask or answer. She's been dead for more than one decade.
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