the park
I want to make a park.
Somewhere that allows things like skateboarding and rollerblading, with color fights on Friday nights and dance fights on Tuesday nights and free/cheap concerts under a big oak tree. There'll be a playground that's big and strong enough to accommodate adults, because let's be honest, all of us deep down want to swing on a swing set. There'll be good climbing trees and people can come and have picnics on the grass or build fairy houses in the woods or go for a nature walk and just exist without having all of the rules and expectations of society.
At the center of town, there's an old park that was first built a couple of hundred years ago during the Industrial Revolution. It started off small: a place to preserve nature with paths and benches, a few sports fields for recreational use. Generations of children have played there, families picnicked, and teens skateboarded. The park began as a simple place to gather outdoors, and for the longest time, that's all there was.
Eventually, a group of young people just out of college moved into an apartment nearby the park. Some of them had grown up going to this park for picnics and hikes, while others were having their first introduction to it. One of the girls kept a journal, and in it, she wrote the above entry. Over the course of the next few years, this team of individuals grew and dedicated their time to turning this park into a place that people would actually use. They fundraised, hired builders, and brought their small community together around the creation of this place that would benefit everyone.
Nowadays, the park contains all of the things you would expect of a well-used, well-loved local park: playgrounds, basketball courts, and sports fields at the bottom of the hill.
The main playground set is a favorite among the local kids. The whole thing is wooden, save for the bright orange plastic slides and the metal firefighter pole. The slides have collected years' worth of sharpied names and initials in hearts on them, from decades of teenagers wanting to immortalize something in their lives. One of these slides is a curved tube, and you can't see the end from the top of it, even though it's only about 5 feet off of the ground. It's a prime place for kids to startle their friends going down, or to hide in during hide-and-seek (that is, if you can wedge yourself sufficiently enough to not slowly slide down in the middle of the game).
There are wooden steps leading up to each end of the playground, fun ladders, and a rope-and-board bridge connecting the two sides. It's one of those stereotypical playground rope bridges, with large wooden planks side-by-side and a metal cable running through each end of the wood. The fun part is simply that it moves while you go over it. Most local children can remember the time they were first brave enough to cross "the shaky bridge" without holding onto the railings. As soon as you do it once, though, you'll be running full-speed across it every time you're there.
Behind the playground is a set of swings, and you can always find some kids sitting on them after school. Later on in the evening, the park becomes more of a place for teenagers and young adults to hang out with friends, working on homework and talking until the sun goes down and they're expected to be back at home for dinner.
Further on beyond the swings is a small concrete skate park. It's become a small tradition that every time someone gets a new trick, they get to write or paint something on the obstacle they got (or if it was something like a kickflip, they'll paint the exact spot on the ground where it finally happened.) Some will use spray paint, while others will simply write their name or draw a small picture or symbol in sharpie. Usually these things consist of names, initials, and little symbols that serve as tags for specific people. It's a mark of honor to get to write your name at the end of the metal rail.
In the park, there's a little snack stand that's open pretty much every day. They're open later on Thursdays, Fridays, and Saturdays to accommodate for the fact that people generally stay out later on the weekends, especially in the summer.
This place has little prepackaged snacks, chips, granola bars, protein bars, and fresh-made popcorn. There's an ice cream cooler filled with ice cream sandwiches and those Oreo and strawberry ice cream bars that taste like 5th grade and ice cream cones. There0s a decent selection of penny candy, supplies to make things like tea and hot chocolate (especially as it starts to get colder out) and sometimes traditional ice cream and snow cones, though that job is usually left to the ice cream shop down the road and the ice cream truck that comes through on really hot days. They sell fried dough on event nights, so a lot of times before people get covered in paint at the color fights, they'll get covered in powdered sugar and cinnamon.
The snack shack also has a pretty extensive first aid kit, just in case. There's always the risk of some athlete getting injured during a game and needing an ice pack or an ace bandage. And there's always the risk of someone going for a new trick at the skating rink and needing a decent-sized band-aid. The first aid kit is on the outside of the building in a little lock box that pretty much everyone knows the code to: 2019. That code was set during the summer of 2019, and nobody has changed it since. There were plenty of jokes during the summer of 2021 that 2019 was "last summer," and whenever anybody referred to last summer, it was understood that they meant two years ago, because let's be honest, summer of 2020 barely existed and didn't count.
In the summer, there's a free concert series that gets put on by the town recreation department every year. Artists will sign up to do concerts in the park for an evening, with music every Wednesday. These are a bunch of small artists and local bands, some of which are entirely comprised of wonderfully ambitious high school students. There are also regular, scheduled concerts on Friday nights, and it's always a different artist or band there. Tickets are sold for searing, but if you want to stand in the back, you're more than welcome to — it's a bit hard to soundproof the outdoors. There's a metal scaffolded rig of lighting things, so lights can be hung or taken down in the winter (though tobe honest, there are some cool events that happen in the winter, so the lights usually stay unless there's a hurricane or a blizzard coming). It's covered by a long wooden structure to help mitigate the elements, though the lights are meant to be outdoors and generally do okay in the weather. The public school has a really great music program, which has fed into the interests in music of a number of local teens. It's a running joke that the fifth grade band at the middle school is practically an army because of how many students sign up for it each year. The band does thin out a little bit as students get older and choose one hobby over another. Some of the kids in fifth grade band are only there because their parents made them sign up because "It'll be good for you, you'll like it!" and quit once they get the chance (or they fall in love with it and stick with band until the day they graduate and beyond). Regardless, this undoubtedly contributes to the small bands of students that get together outside of school and volunteer to play at fundraising concerts and summer nights in the park. There also are some local and semi-local artists who are trying to make a name for themselves and practice playing and singing as many gigs as possible. There's a small wooden stage that these artists perform on, and the audience brings their lawn chairs and picnic blankets to sit and listen to the music. There also is a small "tech shed" that is weatherproofed very well for a shed at a park, mainly because it has to be. This is where things like microphones, speakers, chairs, and music stands live, along with a few extra clip lights for times when the weather is a bit cloudy. The shed contains all of the controls for lighting and sound, and that's where the sound people will camp out on concert nights. Every single artist that comes and plays in the park is able to sign their name in sharpie on the inside wall of this little shed. It started out with the people who built the place signing it, then those who worked in lighting and sound for the concerts. Eventually it became a tradition among all of the artists who have ever played a concert there. There are a handful of signatures from people who years later became famous, and others whose groups disbanded and whose music is largely lost to time. Of course, you can't have an outdoor concert like this in inclement weather, but there is a "just-in-case castle tent" that gets set up when it's particularly cloudy, just in case it starts to rain, so that the Expensive Music Things don't get ruined. This was given to the rec committee shortly after a particularly stressful surprise thunderstorm that rained out a concert. The band had already gotten everything set up and was beginning to warm up, with an audience already gathering, when huge dark storm clouds rolled in. It looked like something out of a movie; at least, that's what everyone who was there that night says. As soon as the skies started to open up, band members and helpful audience members alike began sprinting to put all of the things away before the rain picked up. It turned out to be a torrential downpour for about a half an hour, after which the sun came back out with a gorgeous sunset. In the end, it all worked out: no music equipment was lost, and the concert's start was only delayed by about an hour — everyone was laughing by the time the band re-set-up and was getting started for real — but it was enough of a scare that the rec committee began fundraising for a tarp tent that they could put over the stage, just in case. Before the fundraiser was even fully in the works, a few generous families all pitched in and bought a few tents that fit the stage.
There are also some wonderful holiday traditions that happen in the park. [Once again, I have to do some research on religions that I'm less familiar with, but here's what I can confidently write for now.] Every year on the Saturday before Easter, there's a giant Easter egg hunt that happens in the park. Eggs are filled by people who work at the snack shack (and the various volunteers, friends, and family members that they rope in) with all manner of things — candy, 50 cents, tiny shaped erasers, etc. — and hidden all around the park for the local kids to come and find. It's generally accepted that the not-really-hidden eggs are meant for the little kids to find, and older kids will just pretend not to see them and move on to climbing to get the ones hidden in trees or looking under trash cans and inside logs. People come up with some really creative hiding places. Of course, there are also snacks, and a local group always has a huge bake sale that day to raise money. There are some similar traditions surrounding other holidays, too: a Christmas tree lighting, where the whole park gets decorated with all manner of lights and they all get lit up one night in December once the sun goes down. There's also a menorah that gets each candle turned on with each day of Hannukah every year. The park lighting is the same night as the school's holiday concert, where the jazz band always plays Linus and Lucy and the chorus sings holiday songs from around the world. After the concert, everyone piles into their cars to head just down the road to the park (though some choose to walk, because the traffic that night gets a little bit crazy) to see the tree lighting an hour later.