Here, some dandelions--noticeably aged with graying tops--cast replenishing seeds into the air and dance like nineteen forties teenagers to a jukebox of wind. The younger ones, stain-yellow and rigid, huddle together in groups of four or five and linger into a blooming darkness like housewives at a book club, worried about their children. There is a simple kind of grass here, too, a kind you couldn't escape in any part of the world, and eight or nine trees--most of which are worthy of climbing. It is as loud or as quiet as a stadium, depending on when you visit.

The most important thing about it, though, is that it all happens here--at this place. This is where it all happens. Everything. Take a look.

A boy is moving in circles around a maple tree, stepping from root to root. He is waiting for his sister's soccer game to end and, due to impatience, he has driven himself into a theatre of his own creation. He stops to throw sand over an ant hill and mimics the communication signals of old war radios--scattered and ineffective--by speaking into his hands.

Here, he collects a handful of maple seeds and throws them to the sky as though he is freeing a bird. The seeds pause for a moment and then swirl to the ground--in a footrace. He imagines they are dancing insects and tries to catch them in an imaginary net. He puts them in an imaginary bottle and covers the top with a thick, heavy book. They are his friends.

Teenagers run through here at night, soaking the sides of their feet in cold dew and poor judgment--stomping out cigarettes and too-long school days as they break curfew and make their parents worried. They carry scrawled SOS notes tucked into half-full bottles and they open dialogues with songs that in time will become distant voices. They are idealists. They are hypocrites, too.

Here, they find the button for the tennis court spotlights underneath the transformer and in this discovery they construct a theatre and a stage. They illuminate themselves. They ignore the nets and the painted white lines. They spin a bottle around and around--it rubs against the pavement like a canoe over a submerged log, carrying two lovers.

An old couple, together now for forty-three years, guides a small dog while walking and chatting in an empty afternoon. The man, forgetting for a moment the conversation's purpose, begins humming a tune he once sang loudly with friends in a café in the city, growing up. She remembers the same melody, upon hearing it again, and recalls her first ride in an automobile--the smell of the exhaust and the radio's inefficiency both messy like a stack of dishes after a feast.

Here, they find a sort of finish line--satisfying, nimble and at odds with the stopwatch and the cap gun. The participation ribbon is the most heavily ordained trophy. Incidentally, they have set their own world record. They can hear the roar--angry and pleasant--of the stadium's spectators. They feel a wind they have created themselves by running.

A mother sits beside a patch of dandelions with her toddler inside her lap at dusk. She hopes that her daughter will never grow to be afraid of spiders or the goop that forms at the bottom of the sink--near the drain--after an hour of cleaning dishes. She hopes that her daughter will feel the things she has felt--the safety of a canoe trip with a lifejacket--the crowd's approval of a confident tennis serve--the love that is generated in caring for a wounded animal--the companionship of a drunken pilgrimage. All of these things.

She holds up a maple seed that has fallen on her thigh, dry and brown, and places it overtop of her daughter's finger, matching the curves and lines by closing one eye.

"There will always be things that are like other things," she says, looking down onto her daughter's freckled nose. "That's just the way it all works."