On weather patterns and playgrounds,

Today, it is fifty degrees and misting. Our windows are unlocked, as Kurt Vonnegut predicted they would be, and you can smell something that reminds you of spring in the air. Its not quite spring yet, but it will be soon. We are anxious and the trees are anxious to clothe themselves in an appropriate fashion and smile at the sun.

However, on days like today when it could be snowing but isn't, I think about Brooklyn. I grew up there, in the back alley behind our apartment, and in the winter I would run from one end of the alley to the other, dodging cars and thinking my small world was gigantic. My grandmother and I used to crouch down together in the minuscule garden plot in the spring and she would tell me that Tiger Lily's were her favorite (because they were named after her). In the summertime I would sit on the porch and watch the Chinese children run by in their backpacks, swinging my legs and drinking ginger ale, thinking about nothing (a skill I have since lost).

It was in this time, this junction between winter and spring that I always liked best. For some reason the smells of wet earth and shimmering sidewalks always reminds me of afternoons at the playground. I would wear a rain jacket and my grandmother would hold my hand as we walked the streets to get there. At the park I could go on my own, safe within the peeling black bars.

Brooklyn playgrounds, when I was a child, were better than anything I have ever seen or imagined. I remember towering slides which would turn molten temperatures under the sun, so hot that you flew off as soon as you got to the bottom. I remember swings able to go so high and so free that you could close your eyes and lose your place in the universe. I remember spinning things that my father would turn, and turn, and turn until I couldn't walk straight.

But more than anything I remember something I called, theTowers. They were nothing more than columns of wood, painted red and faded to a warm pink, stacked next to each other with no space in between. The columns started high in the middle and slowly got shorter and shorter as they went out, with the result looking like a pyramid. I could climb all the way to the top and my grandmother would yell my name followed by something in Norwegian.

I would close my eyes, stare at the sky without questions, and become the queen of the world.

These features have disappeared from playgrounds now, even the Brooklyn ones. I think something great has been lost, but I am not a child anymore.