I saw a chair on a playground and it made me think of writing.
Not about the chair itself – this isn’t Ode to a Playground Chair – but about the circumstances that once surrounded it. My wife and I came upon it in a Tennessee December, and we could only guess at how long it had been there. It somehow managed to appear beaten up – its leather torn, its arms missing, its legs tilted unsteadily in the grass – while also seeming fresh, as though someone had left it there just hours before we found it.