The toddler is off, fully clothed, racing into the sprinkler, while the mother yells, “no!” Clearly, she came unprepared.

It is a balmy Sunday after Labor Day and the sprinklers in the Park Slope Playground at Lincoln Place, with their calming, water sounds are usually off by now. Today is steamy, however, and perhaps the Parks Department has decided to give families one last sweet taste of summer. 

A few weekends ago, it looked completely different. The end of August was cool and grey and, while walking the dog, I noticed the sprinkler was off, heralding the official end of the summer season. None of the usual sounds — squeals of small children, shoots of water, thumping of basketballs — were present. It was quiet and looked like everyone had gone home for good, shopping for back-to-school supplies, starting the endless process of preparing lunches and settling in for another academic year.

My children have grown up and left the house. As a preschool teacher, I cannot say how many hours I have logged at the playground with other people’s children. But I also spent untold hours at this playground with my own children. When they were little, we were sometimes here twice a day, once in the morning, then later, after naptime. When my mother-in-law would drive up from Virginia, we would bring picnic lunches and sit at the chess tables. On one of these visits, she commented that she was having a moment of déjà vu: “Am I in Boston in the 1970s with my two small children or am I in Brooklyn in the 1990s with my two small grandchildren?”

When my children were older and in elementary school, we would sometimes come by for a half hour on the way home. Then there was the day we stopped. We never went to the playground again.

Exactly what day was that? Was it a Friday, or a Sunday? Was it in spring or summer? I could not possibly say because it wasn’t until years later that I noticed the lack of the playground in our lives. It simply came and went, completely unnoticed at the time. Yet, later, when I realized that we had stopped going to the playground entirely, it overwhelmed me. I could not stop thinking about it. I had to know. “When was it?” I asked the girls, who by now were in middle- and high school. I asked my husband. None of us could come up with an answer.

No one had prepared me for the last day at the playground. Would I have brought a cake? Could I have prepared a speech for the girls? “Today is our last day at the playground. We will never come here again. Let’s really enjoy it, because this is not just another day at the playground. It’s our last one.”
 
We’ve talked about this many times in my family since the day we realized our loss. “I took Noah to the playground recently,” my younger daughter countered, referring to one of her babysitting charges. We looked at each other, both of us immediately realizing that this did not count.

Soon the sprinkler will be off for the fall. The air will turn cooler, and the children will start to wear their layers. Today, however, it is still late summer and typically humid. Parents push toddlers in tandem in swings that sing a whiny song. 

Passing by with the dog, I am now an observer of other families at the playground, as sun rays filter through sparks of sprinkler water that squirt up into the late summer sky.

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Anita Bushell is the author of “One Way to Whitefish” (2024), and “Object Essays: A Collection” (2022). Her work appears in multiple publications online. anitabushell.com