A Girl and Her Swing

Our swingset has been getting a terrific workout lately. Every day before kindergarten and after kindergarten Sarah is out swooping up and down in full force. Sometimes she’s joined by The Banana and Mr. Sneaky Pants and they pretend they are pirates sailing on a stormy sea, or space aliens traveling to various new planets, and sometimes she’s out there alone, swishing up and down.

The creak of the swingset just makes me a happy Mama. I have such great memories of spending entire days outside as a child on my swingset, trying to figure out if I could make a complete revolution around the green bar the swing was attached to. I loved trying to swing higher than the nearby Russian Olive bush. I would sing to the cars as they passed on the highway, trying to make sure I was extra high for the upcomming rural traffic. I’d furiously pump up and down as the corn choppers would haul their loads of silage through the yard in the fall. Later on, I spent many hours hanging upside down from the monkey bars pretending to be a world class gymnast. The swingset was one of my favorite things about being a kid.

I even remember shopping in Jamestown for my green swingset when my brother was either just born or not quite born yet, so I was either two and a half or three and a half. I really wanted one of the swingsets with a two seat swing (which my children ironically have and love, and I didn’t plan it) but they were probably a little too expensive, so my parents and I drove home with a boxed up simple green swingset with two yellow swings, a monkey bar, and a little tiny slide on the side. It didn’t talke me long to get over the lack of a two seat swing, because I was so happy to have any kind of a swing.

Here are some swinging photographs from the past:

This first one is a photograph of me and my friends Bridgette (who then spelled her name Bridget) and her brother Trevor, who I was absolutely convinced I was going to marry when I was just a bit older. (I kept on making wedding plans until I was about five and he was about seven and I rammed into him when we were both riding tricycles on the back porch of our house and knocked out his front tooth. He kind of insisted we call off the romance at that point). I am the one with the untied shoe.

The second image was taken not at my house, but at the home of Bridgette and Trevor, and a few years later. You can see the emergence of my baby brother sitting on that coveted two seat swing just like The Banana does. In fact he was probably the same age as The Banana. On the far right you will also find Bridgette and Trevor’s younger brother Ian. Playing at their house was the ultimate treat as a child. There was always something incredibly exciting going on there. They always had a plethura of kittens to cuddle, neat A-frame outdoor playhouses, tractor inner tubes to bounce on like a trampoline, and check out that electrical wire spool in the background with the ladder and slide. Talk about fun! I could go on with entertaining stories all day. Maybe I’ll do that sometime.

But the point of this post: swinging is fun.