i should be doing laundry but instead i am writing this.

i took off running this morning without a plan other than to go 10 miles, so of course the first decision i made was to head down the ginormous hill we live on. i am tootling on down wondering which way i'll decide to go when it sort of dawns on me there are subdivisions all around with their fancy-schmancy stone entrances off the main road. so turn in the first one. and, it's up hill. straight. up. like for a mile. great decision, ace!

these subdivisions go nowhere. there are a couple that connect in some way to each other but that's it - there's one way to the main road. period. one of them even had a "dead end" sign which i thought had all been replaced by the softer "no outlet". apparently not.

so, they have no thru traffic, ergo - they are quiet. very quiet. eerily quiet. maybe it IS dead end. gah! no, seriously... what's missing is the children. there are no children in these subdivisions. a few yards have swingsets and a few drives have basketball hoops and i did see three bicycles in one yard. but no children to play on the equipment.

one wonders, where have all the children gone?

i have a few theories.

1 - all the children have grown up. when mini-me was but a wee tyke, many of her cohort lived in these subdivisions. the kids grew up. the parents stayed. in all my travels this morning, i saw like 2 houses for sale. stable neighborhoods peopled with old folk who are too decrepit to remove the swingsets from the backyard.

2 - all the children have been raptured off to organized sports. i'll admit that when mini-me was but a wee tyke, she particpated in her fair share of organized sports, but in our defense, that was all the rage then. we didn't know about The Value of Unstructured Playtime. we knew about The Neighborhood Boogieman. we knew you couldn't just let kids outside to play. they had to be watched or someone might snatch them up. but now, it's simply overdone. there's too much participation and not enough sport. but, that's another argument for another day.

3 - all the children are inside playing video games and eating cheetos.

4 - there are no children in these neighborhoods. the swingsets are for the grown-ups but they were sleeping in.

5 - there weren't really any swingsets, basketball hoops, or bicycles. i premagined it all.

6 - all the children were playing on all the equipment, but they all hid when i came into view. or, they were disguised as play equipment so that they could go outside & play and not be in danger of a boogie-nabbing. or they all have invisibility cloaks. or they are all invisible.

7 - all the children blew away in a storm.

8 - there is a morning curfew on these neighborhoods, and the children aren't allowed to go outside and play before 10AM.

9 - all the children were still asleep.

10 - all the children have turned into flowers.