The green children's carousel

The village where Ada had grown up had a small playground. Between tall grass that was rarely mown, stood a green children's roundabout, its paint peeling off. At seven years old, she had pushed the old thing so hard once that she felt terribly sick, and at sixteen she smoked her first cigarette there, which had made her just as nauseous.

Since then, almost eight years had passed. The cigarettes had stayed, they no longer made her feel sick… only the green roundabout was gone. The whole playground was gone, to be precise. The grass had grown so tall over the years that even the swings would no longer be visible, if the wind still swung them gently back and forth, as it used to. There was no more loose gravel. No sand-stone mixture at the end of the hot metal slide. In the settlement there now stood a new, more modern playground with a cable car and countless other frills. Frills like roundabout paint with rain and weather protection.

The first time she passed the old playground again and saw that only far too tall grass remained, the sight gave her an unexpected pang. They hadn't even left the fence standing. She stood there and asked herself who on earth had come up with the idea of simply catapulting such an important place into the past. The green roundabout with its ridged floor and round turntable with a chequerboard pattern – only memories now.

No one had made it their business to preserve the old equipment. To maintain it or – she didn't want to think about this either – to renew it. It would probably have seemed like a crime to her if they had replaced the green roundabout with a new one or swapped the metal slide for a plastic one. She too had given no thought to the playground. She had been away for so long, had only concerned herself with herself, had found new friends, discovered and grown to love new places. And this one? How could she have forgotten the playground? Why hadn't anyone told her when it was dismantled and razed to the ground? And if someone had told you, she thought, what could you have done about it anyway? What good would it have done to keep the old place standing?

Eventually the last green patch of the roundabout would simply have peeled off and rust would have eaten through the chequerboard pattern like insects through dead flesh. No. She could have done nothing. She would probably have just stood there helplessly and said goodbye in her thoughts and thanked it for all the beautiful memories.

"You give your heart to too many lifeless things," her mother had once said to her, as she fought back tears whilst they watched the foresters saw down the old silver birch because its trunk was completely eaten away and rotten.

She fished a cigarette from her pocket, stepped into the tall grass of the former playground and sat down at the spot where the green children's roundabout had stood. The smoke rose into her lungs and made its way back out into the fresh air within seconds. No cough, no nausea.

She was now grown up and the playground was gone. It felt to her as if both had happened overnight. Ada knew that things changed. That time sorted out the old and welcomed the new as if it were the easiest thing in the world. Ada knew that her mother was right. Stupid naive heart, she thought. So stupid, stupid, stupid.

But actually she wasn't angry with herself. It had been the same before. She wasn't angry that it hurt her so much – she knew the pain was one of those things that also passed. She was angry that the other adults failed to recognise the magic that the trees, the flowers and yes, the green children's roundabout possessed. As if they could all tell stories. They all had something about them. Something magical.

As a child she had felt this more than she did today. Maybe the cigarette smoke is clouding your mind, she thought and had to smile.

So there she sat, in the tall grass. With the heavy, small, stupid heart in her chest, which longed for the swings, the metal slide and the roundabout, because it still clung to lifeless things. Transience was a fact of reality that lay like stones in her stomach.

Even earlier, transience had shown Ada its ugly face and no matter how much the girl had resisted, it had taken so much from her without mercy. Only later, as a woman, had she realised that transience too brought a kind of magic with it. One that hid behind the face – a double face, like an actor or a conjurer from old fairy tales.

Transience could teach you not to overlook the magic that the things, the places, the flowers, the trees, the people around you carried with them. Its face was ugly, but every time it blew through the air and banished the old together with time, it sang a quiet song. A beautiful one that spread through Ada's heart just as much as the sorrow for what had already passed: At least you saw it. At least you felt it. You recognised the magic when it was still there and you won't forget it. The tree just as little as the green children's roundabout.