Swings

Now, like most of you I have had a life full of swings. Emotional swings, financial swings, life event swings and mood swings. But nothing can ever warm my heart more than a swing hanging from a sturdy branch where I can let the cool breeze pull it’s fingers through my hair, kite my skirt and fill my heart with the memories and feelings of being a child again.

There is something about a swing I can’t resist. I am always reminded of my childhood and the poem by Robert Louis Stevenson when I think of swings.

How do you like to go up in a swing,

Up in the air so blue?

Oh, I do think it the pleasantest thing

Ever a child can do!

So many of my memories in my childhood have involved swings. Going to a one room school house in rural Ohio when I was a young girl and having recess where I could swing. I would take that rusty old girl as high as I would dare to go. Holding my head back as far as I could without slipping off the seat I would watch the clouds move with me. Back and forth. Back and forth. Challenging the dizziness within my head.

The tire swing that my father put up for us when I was about eight years old. We lived near a big bubbling and winding creek where Daddy hung a big rough rope around the strongest tree limb he could find. My brother and I would swing out over the edge of the water, hanging on for dear life for fear of falling into the tumbling water below. It was exciting. It was fun. Just the feeling of the cool summer air whoosh by my body with each swing still remains in my mind.

Childhood will never leave. It’s still inside somewhere, but the years have passed and life has moved on without a swing for me. Until, that is, until my son put up a swing from a very strong limb for his daughter Lucienne. He hadn’t a clue that that swing would also be for me, his 81-year-old mother, who has never lost her love for a swing.

Every chance I get while jogging down my son’s winding driveway past the aging fir trees I can’t resist, no matter how urgent my task. I stop and take a ride and reawaken the child inside on the swing that hangs from the strongest branch that was made for Lucienne.

Copyright SandraHart 2020