WOOD TAG
Do you remember playing Wood Tag?
Once upon a time, Andover wanted a playground. After a massive fund raising effort, a giant community gathering was held to build the playground. I remember showing up to help. My job was to shovel gravel around the playground, which I did enthusiastically. I worked into the evening until the last worker came to take my shovel and put it away for the night.
That wooden playground stood for probably twenty years. Then, several children in other parts got slivers from wooden playgrounds and became very sick. That resulted in tens of thousands of communities across the nation turning to panic and chain sawing their playgrounds into saw dust.
Before all that happened, it was our playground and we spent many hours playing on it throughout our teen years. Our favorite game is a game that is long gone - lost to the wood chips of past playgrounds and weakly replaced my similar version. Our game was Wood Tag.
What was wood tag? It was a simple game of tag but you could only walk on wood. You could go anywhere on the playground and do anything you needed to do so long as your feet remained on the wood. The moment you stepped off - you lost and became "it". And like any game of tag, if you were it, you had to chase and tag everyone else.
We would often play tag deep into the night. Then lay on the picnic tables and watch airplanes pass over the night sky as pinpoints of light.
Those were the days. That was our playground. And wood tag was our game.
