And the playgrounds of hard-packed dirt…

Five kids risking their lives diving off some flimsy apparatus into head trauma water levels, while little Sally prepares to toddle on off out of the goddamn yard to god knows where. Just another normal 70s afternoon. pic.twitter.com/cPNIWJl6Ii

— Super 70s Sports (@Super70sSports) July 3, 2022

... and all the playground equipment metal (the swing seats were wooden; the fancy ones were rubber). Slides were the best: oven hot and as slick as rubber. And never any trees, never any shade. The metal was sharp, the wood splintery.

Oh, wait, that was the’60’s. My bad.*

“Sally prepares to toddle off”? Do we assume the camera took pictures by itself? Or the photographer is a disinterested backyard voyeur?

However did we survive the’60’s and’70’s to reach this Age of Enlightenment?

I remember playing on the neighbor’s swingset that had a sort of seesaw on it. Two seats for riders facing each other, suspended from four poles on which the connected  seats swung back and forth. The bolt on one such support was missing, but what cared we? Until that support swung like Poe’s deadly pendulum and sliced neatly into the top of my upper leg.

I remember my biggest concern was that I’d put a hole in my new blue jeans. I also remember mercurochrome, a band aid, and going the next day for new blue jeans. Or maybe we just patched those? Yeah, we probably did.

Didn’t even get a tetanus shot. THAT I’d remember!