One of my earliest memories is of swinging on a swing at the back of our yard. I couldn’t have been more than 3, because we were still living in the house on Dean Avenue, across the street from the Fairgrounds, and we left that house the summer I was 3 and a half, after my younger sister was born. My father probably made the swing, cutting and sanding the wooden board seat, and knotting the stout ropes that hung it from a tree limb. I remember he taught me how to pump my legs so that the swing would go higher and higher without being pushed. After we moved, we would walk up to the school play ground to swing on the swings there. They had metal seats and chains, with pea gravel underneath them to cushion our falls.
Carolyn Butler had a swing set in her back yard, one with tubular metal legs that weren’t very well seated in the ground. If you swung high enough on her swing, the legs would come out of the ground and threaten to tip the whole thing over. There was a rumor that someone had once swung so high on Carolyn’s swing that they went right up over the metal bar on top and down the other side. I don’t remember who was supposed to have done this, or who, if anyone, saw it happen, but it gave us all chills to talk about it. One of the best things to do on a swing is twist it around and around, until the chains make a tight spiral, and then lift your feet off the ground so that the spiral unwinds fast enough to make you dizzy. Sometimes we just pumped the swing up as high as we could and jumped off. It was almost like flying.
Do kids even swing anymore? Or has someone decided swings aren’t safe enough? God forbid a child should pinch a finger, or scrape a knee, or whack a head. I know kids don’t roam the neighborhood from dawn to dusk like we did, playing whatever we wanted, twisting round on swings seats until we were dizzy enough to throw up, or jumping off swings to fly. Now kids spend their summers at day care, or day camp, or play dates, carefully supervised to keep them from getting hurt – to keep them from flying.
The Swing
Robert Louis Stevenson
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!
Up in the air and over the wall,
Till I can see so wide,
Rivers and trees and cattle and all
Over the countryside—
Till I look down on the garden green,
Down on the roof so brown—
Up in the air I go flying again,
Up in the air and down!
