The Playground Behind the Church

“Two seats come up in November,” she said. “I’m going to file my papers.”

She filed in the summer with the town clerk. Her whole campaign was a card the size of a recipe card, with a photo of the playground on one side, and on the other her phone number and one sentence: “Let’s build things.”

The election came the next November, the first Tuesday of the month, with the school gym open for voting and a bake sale in the lobby. Two seats were up. Jenna Albrecht came in first with 441 votes. The second seat went to a retired shop teacher named Hal Ferris, who had never run for anything in his life and got 318.

Doug Hesse came in third, with 289.

He had held that seat for eleven years.

Ryan saw the results on the town hall door on his way home from a storm call, and told me over the sink.

“He lost,” he said.

“I know.”

“I don’t feel good about it.”

“No,” I said. “I don’t either.”

And that was the truth. I did not feel triumph, and I did not feel sorry. I felt the way you feel after a long shift, when the last chart is signed and the floor is quiet. Something had been decided, by people, in the open, and it was finished.

Saturday morning

The first Saturday after the election was bright and cool, with a hard blue sky and the maples bare.

I sat on the bench by the swing beam with a thermos and a paper cup, the way I do most Saturdays now. There were nineteen kids on the structure by nine o’clock. Nineteen, on a tower that was built for twelve, because kids do not read the sign.

The noise carried. Doug had been right about that, I will give him that much. On a still morning it rolled three blocks, a high, happy, ragged sound with no pause in it.

I would not trade one second of it.

Alvin Gruber’s lawn chair sat at the corner of the lot, next to the swing beam. The church had left it there, folded against the fence. Most Saturdays he came and sat in it for an hour, with his boots crossed at the ankle, and watched the children.

This morning he had a quart jar on his lap, a brand-new one, full of quarters. He had been to the bank for them. Every child who came off the slide that morning stopped at his chair, one at a time, and he gave each of them a quarter, without a word, the way Verna used to.

Josie sat down next to me on the bench. She was eleven now, or nearly. She was taller than she had been, with her hair in a braid and her notebook under her arm.

“Mama,” she said. “I wrote something new.”

She opened it to the last page. Under the two hundred and twelve names, in her careful printing, there was one line.

Playground: finished.

She closed the notebook and tucked it back under her arm, and she ran off to the tower.

I asked one man for one lot, and he said yes on the second ring. Everything after that was other people.

I sat on that bench in the cold sun with my coffee, and I listened to every bit of the noise.