Kid-sized

It was so soft. Like a mattress or even a pillow.

I was shocked to discover the flexible surface of my neighborhood playground. They use some kind of rubber padding and wood mulch now, instead of the knee-scraping asphalt that used to cover playgrounds. It felt wonderfully squishy to walk on.

And colors. No gun-metal gray, only upbeat red, yellow, blue, green and simple beige.

The monkey bars have been transformed too, into oval hand and feet grips that made very cool frames for seeing the rest of the world.

There’s also the rope bars, which seem a little less hazardous than the metal ones because they give your feet some grip.

They still have slides, but they’re not the metal that used to make them unusable on hot summer days. The edges are smooth and curving, no places for little hands and shoelaces to get caught and hurt.

I’m almost too wide to get down a slide now, but in those precious few seconds I remembered what it was like to let gravity carry you on a long wave.

There are still swings and tires on chains, and for a moment I was soaring above the treetops, pretending to be a swooping egret there in the clouds.

I even pushed my body into the long tube with peepholes. We didn’t have those when I was growing up, but I loved the different perspectives it gave me on trees and the school building.

So much to see from the kid’s angle. I felt right-sized.