"Will you play with me?” the little one asks. 

Less and  less these days – she is seven, an age where she is discovering the pleasure of friends, and, occasionally, reading in the solitude of her room.  

Still, it remains a reasonably frequent question, and one that I dedicate some time to thinking up answers to.

“Sure,” I tell her, setting my laptop aside.  “What do you wan to do?”

“What do *you* want to do?” she asks, and we discuss the merits of coloring in the giant Strawberry Shortcake coloring book, or perhaps drawing our own pictures (which always end up being pages and pages of vividly colored flowers using the 100 Magic Marker set).  Sometimes a floor game like Quirke beckons; other times we might read a book.

More often it is some game of make believe – a fashion show starring various stuffed animals, or me crawling gamely around on the floor pretending to be a kitty or a dog while she, variously, buys me from the pet store and brings me home, takes me for a walk, gives me a water bowl to lap from.... me all the while mewing or barking up a storm.

Occasionally we will dance wildly to reggae or Queen, decked out as outrageously as possible.  I like to wear the poufy yellow skirt of the old Snow White costume on my head, the wasitband around my forehead so the layers of tulle foam up into a headdress. 

Sophia favors layers of her own clothes, mixing the seasons and purposes  - cotton flowered skirt with wool striped tights, flowerd cowboy boots with blue shorts and pink tights and purple tank top and  yellow mittens - with a bohemeian glee.  Every accessory I possess – from clanking red bangles to lime green rabbit fur scarves to pink sun glasses and strands of real pearls -  is co-opted for the fun.

Whatever we choose, her absorption is total, as is her enjoyment. She is serious about her fun. 

Cities are great playgrounds– we have multiple museums and parks to choose from, and everywhere there is the energy of people out and about.  Even a  simple walk down the street is rife with enertainment in a kaleidoscopic presentaiton of humanity that leaves visiting friends gaping, but that the little one takes for granted:

…and everywhere, of course, there the street cars and busses with their windows full of faces gazing out at us.

As great as they are, though,  cities pose some limitations for childhood play.  There are no gangs of kids to gather in the neighborhood.  The parks are full of strangers, and not a place that kids ride their bikes to and hang out. 

I grew up in a very different place, and our play was almost always unmonitored and outdoors, in part because the house was small and we got on my mom’s nerves, in part because we had no air conditioning, in part because in that time and place, before America’s Most Wanted and To Catch a Predator and the ubiquity of  kids faces on milk cartons, it was still possible to be an unsupervised kid, just, you know, playing.

The only restrictions on my play were 1) don’t ride your bike on busy streets, 2) be home for supper, (or for night play, when the street lights go on) and 3) take your sister.

In spring we followed the rain-swollen creek that ran next to the house.   We’d hollow out the brown husks of milkweed pods that grew on the banks, blowing the white fluff and pretending the seeds with their white silk sails were the children of Charlotte, sailing away on their first baby webs calling “Good bye, goodbye” in their tiny voices to Wilbur the pig.

Half an empty pod made an excellent canoe, and we’d drop them in the creek and race them, running along beside with our sticks that we’d use to free them from tangles of weeds or shallows, or sometimes stick down in the conical mud domes that marked the crawdad holes. 

If we were lucky we’d see a crawdad, and if we were really lucky we’d find a tin can or glass jar and get the crawdad to shoot backward into it.   Then we’d fill it with creek water and take it around the neighborhood, thrusting it under the noses of our mom’s, delighting in their little shrieks.

If it was the right time of year, we’d go around the neighborhood collecting the crisp brown left-behind jackets of locusts that clung to the rough bark of the trees.  Sometimes we got up early to see if we could catch a bug birthing itself from the delicate transparent husk, but we never had any luck.

One entrepreneurial summer we became a perfume manufactory. I was in charge of the packaging department, which involved  going door to door explaining our project to the lady of the house, and asking for any small bottles she might have.

The women were always nice about us interrupting their afternoon, and  were always very accommodating: we collected all manner of containers, incluidng old perfume and cologne bottles, empty Bayer aspirin bottles, and glass test tubes redolent with the pungent dust of the spices they once held. 

Once, we scored a porcelain house with a corked chimney that still held some rancid brown liquid, probably some time of liqueur. Cleaned out, it made an excellent container for our 'House of Dreams'  perfume, a name that to me  evoked a picture of my mom reading in her LaZboy recliner wile the vaccumm cleaner ran itself in our living room that no one ever sat in.

The perfume ingredients were flowers poached from neighborhood gardens and good old chlorinated tap water. We even had cologne for men, made of manly-scented pine needles.  We’d bottle our potions and display them on a card table at the corner of Stevens and Foster street, jumping up and down and shouting "Buy our perfume!” to the cars that stopped on their way to and from the grocery store, work, errands. 

It was frustrating how many people actually stopped their cars and got out for a closer look, smiling at our salesmanship (“this one is called  Sun Blossom, it’s made of honeysuckle! It’s perfect for wives!”) but never buying.  Which was just as well…after a day or two the blossoms rotted, leaving us with many bottles of  brown liquid that smelled identically of stinky feet.

Once, a youngish man of perhaps twenty  asked us to bring some samples of our wares to his car as he idled in the intersection.  My friend Lisa, two years older and more mature, shrieked and quickly backed away.  I spoke to the man for perhaps thirty seconds before I realized  he was naked from the waist down. I glimpsed something strange – something like an old forgotten hotdog and a tangle of black hair, just visible between the shirt tails resting on his thighs.   

I ran back to the corner where Lisa stood and we stared at him unbelievingly as he tried to coax us back to the car.  “You put your ding dong away” Lisa shouted and we screeched with laughter as the driver sped away.

We spent many long hot summer afternoons shooting baskets or shagging fly balls in the big field behind my house, until we got bored with the lack of quality fly balls and started hunting for four leaf clovers, or braiding clover flowers together into necklaces and bracelets. 

During the day the play segregated by gender, but at night the boys would deign to gather with the girls in someone’s back yard to play Ghost In The Graveyard.  

Was it the dark, or the first stirrings of pre-adolescent hormones that made playing at night seem so different?  Crouching between the low branches of a pine tree, my neighbor Steve and I stared at each other, the whites of our eyes glowing in the dark, our hands pressed over our mouths to muffle our giggles as my older brother Scott stalked the neighborhood backyards with a flashlight, bellowing what he’d do when he caught us.

The streetlight glowed above us, making Steve’s blonde hair shine like a helmet. Surely this would give us away, I fretted.  In the distance we could hear a chorus of  frogs down by the creek, and some of the other kids yelling faintly that phrase that always sounded like “olly olly oxen free!” (later I learned it was “Everyone out gets in free!”).

“Let’s go, we can make it,” I whispered to Steve, so ready with the need to run that I thrummed. Steve put his hand on my arm, preparatory to leaving the tree – or so I thought. But he didn’t move, and neither did I, as my brother tromped past like a miniature Godzilla, trying to scare us into giving away our position. 

We sat there for an endless time, the smell of pine needles in our nose. The ground was moist there, where the sun did not penetrate the denseness of the tree; there was a wet earthy smell. 

I sat there feeling the warmth of Steve’s hand on my arm, the coolness of the mulchy ground beneath my shorts.  My heart hammered with the adrenaline of the Scottzilla and the need to run, but the light touch of Steve’s hand kept me glued to the spot. 

“Okay,” he finally whispered to me and we parted the branches and slipped out, Steve brushing the needles from the knees of his jeans and  me already running, running, my favorite neon yellow shorts flashing in the darkness like the lightning bugs that speckled the velvet black night, breathelssly arriving at the 'safe zone' of my backyard, where the other kids were already gathered and calling for us.

The little one loves swimming  – “My favorite thing to do in the whole world!” she crows, and I believe her, since I felt much the same way from age seven to seventeen. 

"Wouldn't it be great if air were water and we could swim all the time?" the little one asks, and while that might be taking it a bit far, I am in general agreement that of all forms of play for a kid, nothing beats being in the water.

Each summer my sister and I  had a season pass to Turner’s Public Swimming Pool.  We’d spend the morning doing our chores, impatiently waiting for Dad to come home for his lunch.  After his bowl of soup and sanwich, he’d drop us off at the pool on his way back to work, where we’d swim until it was time for him to pick us up – 5:15 sharp.

The pool was a big rectangle bisected lengthwise, the deeper right side for adults, the shallow left side for little kids, with two lanes for lap swimmers.  The combination of the hot Illinois sun, long summer afternoons and a sparkling blue pool that smelled cleanly of chlorine and seemed as big as a football field was the very definition of Kid Nirvana. 

But nothing capped a day of swimming like a night of  swimming. Dad put in an aluminum sided pool in the backyard one summer, and it was a great neighborhood draw.   It was modest, only four feet deep and ten feet in diameter but we’d pack as many as seven kids in there, splashing around, sinking each other’s floaties and seeing who could hold their breath the longest underwater. 

Sometimes the neighborhood parents would gather to sit around the back porch in lawn chairs, or in the glider beneath the tree, the men drinking beer and the women iced tea.   We could make them out by their dark shapes and the wink of their cigarettes, and hear their low laughter.  Occasionally a mom would materialize by the side of the pool and warn us not to splash.

“Let me see your fingers,” she’d demand, and we’d frantically try to smooth the prune lines.   We’d stay in the pool indefinitely, but howl in protest at the suggestion we take a bath before bedtime. 

Don’t  you want to get the chlorine out of your hair, mom would ask, and we’d shrug, not caring if we went to bed with the sting of chemicals in our nose, the very smell of summer itself.

To this day, I catch a whiff of chlorine and I am transported back to Turner’s Public Swimming Pool and the cacophony of kid shrieks and shouts of “Look!” and “Watch me!”, the gleam of suntan oil on brown bodies, the watery-applause sound of splashing, the thrumming of the high dive, the ever-present tweet of the lifeguard whistle.

“How was school?” I regularly ask the little one, to which she’ll say something noncommittal, then come close and touch my knee or shoulder as I work on my computer. 

“What can we do?” she’ll ask, which is her older-girl code for “Let’s play!”  It’s a nice day today, a real peach of a day.  If the fog doesn’t roll in, I’ll suggest we make chalk drawings on the sidewalk out front, then sit on the steps and reap the reward -  the neighbors walking back and forth from their cars and errands in the Castro will stop and admire our flowers, our use of color, our creativity. 

They’ll step around the drawings but tonight the footsteps of nighttime walkers will dull the sharpness of the pictures, and by the end of the week they will mostly be worn away.

“What can we do?” the little one will ask again tomorrow, hoping for something as fun and out-of-the-ordinary as chalk drawing.  I’ll have to tell her about my business  trip, and how there is no time for play. 

She’ll shrug and skip off to find something else to do, but I’ll feel a pang. Summer is here and the days are getting longer, but these days, the days of the little one saying “Sandra let’s play!”,  these days of imagination are getting shorter, the dusk of her childhood is already on the horizon.

Soon enough she’ll be asking me to drive her somewhere rather than color with her, and soon after that, she’ll be driving herself, and the memory of asking me “What can we play, Sandra, what can we play?” will be as faded as a flower garden chalked on the sidewalk.