The Park Next Door - New playground coming this summer!

We live right next to a park... Yarrow Central Park. We’re lucky... it’s like an extension to our own garden and back yard. It’s dense with trees, the special kinds they put in parks, that you’re not so likely to have in your garden ... maples with speckled leaves that look like the sun is shining on them, even on a cloudy day. Oaks beautiful in form and leaf, but which you’d rather not have to rake under and elms and evergreens making a canopy of cooling summer shade.

Early in June, the local volunteer community hosts “Yarrow Days” in the park, with booths selling locally made products, lively live music, a multi-fragrant barbeque ( I haven’t noticed what kind of meat they cook, I’ve only ever had my eye on the strawberry shortcake ) and fun and games for the kids.

The rest of the time, the park has many users, in all seasons.

Right now, there are three play areas for youngsters ...for the youngest ones- a fairly conventional playground with swings, slides and scrambling-around-on equipment, --- for middlesters- a skateboard park that only really works for BMX bikes and fills with Timbits wrappings and leaf soup in the winter --- and for elderly teens- there’s a picnic table to hang out at, for drinking pop and talking about the generation gap, Ferlinghetti poetry and existentialism, same as when I was that age.

Changes are coming this summer- The Park staff have been consulting with interested residents over the last year, with plans for both an under-12 kids playground and a Skateboard-BMX park.

First, the kids’ playground.

The natural theme manifests in a berm with a rock climbing wall, hill-sliding for kid-bums and rapid-shoots for toy-cars, tunnels and scary-for-two-year olds high-up walkways. There’s also an ‘engineered’ rock, a water pump, a digger toy and some spinney things that only older kids can manage, but could make them throw up, they’re that good. And there’s a paved path trike route with traffic lines, crosswalks , directional signs and parking bylaws,( just kidding) and some of those space-aged alien-invader climbing/monkey bars, better than the ones at the local school, not that there’s a contest. The current swings will be replaced with fresh ones of the same exhilarating height, but with a smoother ride. (ha!) A sports court will go in later for basket-volley- whatzit-ball.

A lot of the cost of this is within the Park Board’s allocated budget for the improvements. This money comes from DCC’s, which are Development Cost Charges that builders pay to the City of Chilliwack for amenities like schools and parks. DYK-Did You Know...our ecovillage has contributed ~ a quarter of a million dollars of DCC’s in the last several years ... with lots more to come.

But speaking of money, the playground will need donations in order to complete all the special features that the Yarrowites would like for their children. A few Yarrow parents have been beating the bushes for in-kind donations and when I know what they are, I’ll be glad to tell you, so we can all thank the donors. And let's thank the parents now, especially Jill Geisbrecht and Kathy Heppner.

The skate/bikepark is coming later. In a courageous example of community consultation, it’s being planned by the kids who will be using it, under the supervision of a park designer. Virtual swarms of kids are communicating their ideas and enthusiasms by Facebook. The designer is keeping his eye on the correspondence and reports that the kids are gradually scaling back their ambitions to something more doable and they remain excited about how they’ll continue to be involved with its final design and implementation.

Aren't we're lucky with what's coming next door, in the park.

Here's a poem for reading out loud to a friend on a park bench:

The World Is a Beautiful Place

The world is a beautiful place to be born into if you don't mind happiness not always being so very much fun if you don't mind a touch of hell now and then just when everything is fine because even in heaven they don't sing all the time The world is a beautiful place to be born into if you don't mind some people dying all the time or maybe only starving some of the time which isn't half bad if it isn't you Oh the world is a beautiful place to be born into if you don't much mind a few dead minds in the higher places or a bomb or two now and then in your upturned faces or such other improprieties as our Name Brand society is prey to with its men of distinction and its men of extinction and its priests and other patrolmen and its various segregations and congressional investigations and other constipations that our fool flesh is heir to Yes the world is the best place of all for a lot of such things as making the fun scene and making the love scene and making the sad scene and singing low songs and having inspirations and walking around looking at everything and smelling flowers and goosing statues and even thinking and kissing people and making babies and wearing pants and waving hats and dancing and going swimming in rivers on picnics in the middle of the summer and just generally 'living it up' Yes but then right in the middle of it comes the smiling mortician Lawrence Ferlinghetti