Disaster! WordPress changed their entire formatting system to something called “Gutenberg Blocks,” which is supposed to be far superior to the old Classic Editor. I did some research and found out that I could just install the old Classic Editor if I wanted to. False. Fake news. You have to be a PAID subscriber in order to get the old formatting back. Sigh… I guess it’s not a complete disaster, but it’s going to take me some time to get used to the new features. (Update: it turns out it wasn’t fake news, but I didn’t figure that out until later.)
I’ve been reading a book called Out of the Ashes – Rebuilding American Culture by Anthony Esolen. One of the things that he bemoans that we’ve largely lost as a culture is the ability to play. “Americans have a strange relationship with sport. It is a new thing in the world. It is sport that is governed not by the spirit of play, which is also the spirit of mirth and celebration, but by the spirit of work.” He goes on to say that most neighborhoods, except possibly the poorest ones, do not have children playing outside in spontaneous fun pick-up games or other types of play. Children are either inside with their devices, or they are involved in organized sports that leave little room for spontaneity and the type of special “rule-making” that goes on when kids just get together to have fun.
I thought of that the other day when I was exploring the empty lot again across the street. The city has been using it to dump excess snow and this has created wonderfully huge snow mountains. When our kids were young, this would have become a favorite haunt of theirs – up and down the mountains, digging tunnels, building forts, having snowball fights, creating interesting edifices out of all that snow. I’ve never seen anyone else there and it seems a shame. It’s always been just me and the cardinals…and of course the deer which stay hidden. Well, I’m not too old to play, so I made a snowman. It’s a start.
When was the last time you played in the snow?
I’ll probably delete this in the morning. But first, I guess I’d better bone up on the new rules in town for this blog. It definitely won’t be a time filled with the spirit of play!
Lynniebeemuseoday 
These days, someone has to sign a release before kids can do anything that is remotely dangerous. Actually, the way you describe it, the parents of a kid who got hurt on the abandoned site could probably sue the city for creating what the lawyers like to call “an attractive nuisance”.
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My point exactly. These types of laws have created the kind of culture that discourages any kind of non supervised play. And those laws spring up because if someone gets hurt, lawsuits ensue. I understand that the city would not want to be held responsible for injuries incurred while playing on that lot.
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