The Elements

All of the mothers gathered on the edge of the playground at the minimum limit to what might be termed ‘afar’. Children of various sizes ran up and down the playsets, up and over short, playful suspension bridges that jiggled in vibratory colors; one child ran and then immediately another gave chase to enter snaking chutes and slides involute as crazy straws, noises chaotic, cackling jubilantly as they scampered over wood chips back past monkey bars to triangular forms of rotating tic-tac-toe hashes worn sacred as Buddhist prayer wheels spinning in the overcast summer sun amidst the soft colored, powder-coated columns that provided a diagonal shade. The mothers mingled with each other as the children over shoulder enacted different whims of their fancy, and, in kaleidoscopic whirls of decision, switched wildly between who they wanted to be and which game they were playing: fort, cops and robbers, cowboys and indians, or superheroes and the like; or, when the girls split off, just playing house, grabbing some of the gentler boys for husbands and home settlers in the first intimate interactions exchanged awkwardly between boys and girls, when, one or the other suggested imitations of mommies and daddies at home and the same boys who once wanted to be cowboys, but always ended up as Indians, addled by a peck on the cheek at the covered bottom of a plastic playground slide, in several roaring rocket blasts, accelerated away into the aether of adulthood.