Return to the Scene

Labor Day weekends the past few years have offered the opportunity to visit my mom in Sibley, Iowa, due to generally agreeable weather and an extra day for the 1,000-mile round trip. Curt and I just returned from this year’s pleasant and uneventful trip to the town where I was born and lived my first nine years.

Flash back to Labor Day Weekend, 2009: My daughters and grandkids drove with me for the visit to Grandma Neva and Aunt Lois and Uncle John. The women decided to take the kids to the Sibley City Park, where to my delight the two imposing metal slides from my childhood are still providing thrills. There’s the big slide—the two-humper—and its little sister, the one-humper.

As we sat on a park bench watching the kids play, my daughter questioned the wisdom of leaving these slides in place to endanger life and limb, especially in view of the fact that most of the other unsafe equipment had been removed: the big metal jungle gym and monkey bars, where I chipped my new front tooth at age 6; the trapeze bars with the benches you could push as far apart as you dared leap; the whirling merry-go-round that rose high and low as you ran along beside it. I sniffed that I had grown up playing in this park, and did not recall a single incident of anyone being injured.

Right about then, my grandson Will called to me to remove a suspicious mass at the top of the little slide (which, I might add, is “little” only in relation to the giant towering next to it). After climbing to the top and wiping off what turned out to be bird poop, I observed that indeed, the slide did appear wide enough to accommodate a posterior of roughly my dimensions, and sliding on down just seemed like the right thing to do.

Let me just say I knew I was in trouble the moment I started down, because I was FLYING and I knew I had to land on my feet at the bottom and run. But there was loose gravel at the bottom; my feet flew out in front of me and I reached down to brace myself. Then I was on my butt, looking up sheepishly at my “empathetic” elderly mother and big sister and daughters, all with tears of laughter streaming down their faces. I wanted to laugh, too, because I was pretty sure I’d made an ass of myself, but I really wanted to cry. Dear Mom suggested a sign should be placed nearby: “No one over 12 admitted.”

An hour later I was in the emergency room of the county hospital. I had to wear the cast for six long weeks. At least, though, when asked what happened, I didn’t have to say something lame like “carpal tunnel surgery.” No one expected a woman in her mid-50s to answer: “I broke my wrist going down a playground slide.”

A return to the scene: more deadly than it looks

On this year’s trip to the Sibley Park, no one expected me to be daring enough (or dumb enough) to chance a re-enactment of last year’s escapade. I warned my sister Pam that it was dangerous but she actually chanced the two-humper, while I stared down my nemesis, the killer one-humper. Oh, well, there were still no warning signs posted.

Pam on the two-humper (much the more impressive of the two, I admit)