The First Playground

The table was set with hills and valleys that sang in the tones of the earth: greens, browns, and tans that played in patchwork patterns of a somewhat unnatural arrangement. Falling from the heights came still rivers and lakes, sparkling in the dim garage light with that realistic imperfection. Metal-trunked trees sported clumsy leaves that were lumped like red and orange cotton balls that didn’t quite hang on the branches. Tiny plastic towns-general stores and factories, houses and shipping yards-peeked out from the nooks and crannies of a landscape girdled with the iron teeth of train tracks.

The meadows and fields held sheep ad pigs, while cows dominated the highland clearings. Down by the lake, near the old red-brick farm house, a buck was stuck perpetually jumping over an oddly placed bush. Two dogs stood behind it, their tongues hanging out with the effort of the chase as the creaky windmill turned above them at sporadic, child’s-breath intervals. The canines never saw the family of fawns standing in the cold water nearby.

A woman in a long yellow dress leaned on her yellow umbrella and held her yellow hat as she walked down the gravel path to meet a young man with a bowler and a mottled metal car. Together, they traveled the country to see the other residents of their island country, returning to her grand manner home only after hours of exhaustive adventuring. All below could be seen from the one building in the one patch of land cast into darkness thanks to a burnt out bulb: the little church on the hillside that was home to the little habit-bound monk who never moved.

The table was set with a world of ever-autumn. A happy worldlet in the corner of a dusky carport whose air would rip on lazy weekends with the sound of a tiny train whistle. To one man, that table was a refuge heightened by hobbyist devotion. To his daughter, it was the playground that taught her the power of imagination.