Plowshare Park

Equipment by Little Tikes.

Surface: wood chips.

After a fun but slightly crowded play at North Kipling Park, my daughter asked if we could go somewhere quieter.

A quick look at the map revealed a likely candidate just a couple minutes away: Plowshare Park. Surrounded by houses on all sides on a sleepy, looping suburban street, and with a name that brought to mind a board game that requires the strategic gathering of agricultural resources, Plowshare Park had all the signs of a peaceful place. (A plowshare, in case you were wondering, is one of those wedge-type things that animals would drag behind them to turn over the soil on old-timey farms.)

And it was peaceful. Not especially memorable, but peaceful.

For starters, we were the only people there. I didn’t expect it to be packed, but given that it was a sunny afternoon on the weekend, I was surprised not to see any kids at all. The equipment was pretty run-of-the-mill but perfectly fine, and the many trees gave us a good shaded area to throw a ball around and generally enjoy the silence of suburban Toronto.

I hadn’t realized when I looked at the map the first time, but Plowshare Park really is right at the edge of Toronto, in the north-westernmost corner of the city. If we’d thrown a ball a bit too hard it might have ended up in Woodbridge. Go back just a couple of generations and there would have been actual plowshares working the land here.

The time it took to finish my brief daydream about what my life would have been like if I’d been a farmer in 1800s Etobicoke, my daughter had exhausted most of the play possibilities in this small playground, so we moved on.