It feels wrong to look out the window at the backyard now, to see a wide-open space where the playset used to be. 

We took the last pieces of it down this weekend, a chainsaw and some grunt work is all it took to erase the last visible pieces in the yard that marked ours as a home to a child and their childhood. 

It’s incredible how quickly it all came down, years of childhood adventures reduced to four contractor bags. 

Technically those four bags represented just half of the adventures. The other half came down a year ago when we removed the two swings and the monkey bars, cutting the long wooden beam that held them up. 

The trash filled up that weekend; we told ourselves we’d finish the job the following weekend. But then the next weekend came, and we found other things to do. And then the next weekend came, and then the next, and the next. 

There were always excuses to put it off: the trash cans that were already too full, the gutters that needed to be cleaned instead, the pouring rain, the errands that had to be run. 

All were true but none were truly the reason. 

The loud cracking sound that echoed through the yard as my husband gave the rotting wood at the base of the structure a hard push this past weekend? That was the reason. 

It was the crack between childhood and adulthood widening as we said goodbye to the slide I’d ridden down hundreds of times with a tiny toddler seated on my lap. 

It was a crack ripping across my heart as we said goodbye to the tiny alcove above the slide, the one accessed only by a climbing wall, where a pirate once perched, high above the salty seas, to survey the waters surrounding them.

From up there they could see clear across the yard. Now, from the back window, I can too.