A Significant Place

Another short assignment, this time to describe a significant place, paying special detail to specifics and concrete realities than can help individualize the scene and make it vivid and believable to the reader. My description ends with an event, but hopefully that's acceptable because a place is usually not significant unless something happens there.

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"The Donut Pond"

There was once a playground behind my church, and in it stood a large wooden structure, a tower. I often found myself climbing up its rickety steps late at night, my shoes dew-soaked and my hands gripping the rails loosely to avoid splinters. Its wood rubbed rough under my hands as they passed over its cracked and faded grey surface, except for where there were blotches of softer greenish moss and mildew. I would push my pen and journal into my pocket and use both hands to hoist myself up to the topmost beam of the tower. The beam supported a pole beneath it, the kind for kids to wrap their arms and legs around and slide down to the mulch-covered ground below.

My legs would dangle off the beam, with nothing between them and the ground fifteen feet below. To my right lay Grace Fellowship Church, my church, nestled low to the ground like a monastery. It had tan, stuccoed walls, reddish doors, and a prominent frame of dark lumber. Directly before me and to my left were our two small ponds, filled with the memories of several decades’ worth of baptisms and summer camp canoe races. I had participated in both. Behind the ponds was a soccer field that stretched out and ended in a gravel road. Running along the entire length of the road was an edge of woods that circled around the ponds on my left, the church on my right, and closed in on the hill behind me like a great curtain.

I would sit atop my tower at the numerous summer camps or winter retreats my church hosted or during spontaneous times of introspection that led me wandering through the grounds near my church. Journals were filled there, love letters composed, tears shed, curses and questions and praises called out over the waters of the pond. The scene was constant and reliable over the years--the hard line of treetops all around me, the welcoming red doors of the church building, the moon reflecting off the pond water.

I had changed over the years, though--often as a result of time spent on top of that tower. Two summers ago, just weeks before I moved away for college, I heard of plans to tear down the playground. I joked with friends that all twenty years of my faith would collapse along with it. Then, in the last few days before leaving for school, some friends and I had a campfire in the woods near our church. We went to gather wood from a stack of logs and scrap wood, and there I found pieces of the faded grey lumber. These were oddly drier than everything else in the pile, and so we hauled them over to the fire and burnt them up. Everything outside the ring of firelight faded to night, and my shoes became soaked with dew. I felt my insides turning to ashes at what I had done. But as I sat and warmed my hands over the smoldering playground equipment, another tower, made of smoke, billowed up past the treetops and disappeared into the sky.