Silent swing set holds memories
When we moved from Cincinnati to Dayton 18 years ago, my husband didn’t want to move the ponderous wooden swing set.
“Kids need a swing set,” I insisted.
The center wood plank alone weighed 125 pounds and the movers groaned and protested, but I held firm: “Kids need a swing set.”
It was built solid as a bunker and couldn’t be dismantled, so the movers loaded it onto the truck wholesale, no doubt cursing me under their breath.
It was well worth it when the swing set was ensconced in the backyard — something familiar and well-loved for our toddler son, Alec, who was so puzzled by our leaving Cincinnati that he speculated, “I know why we’re moving. Because this is a bad house.”
It wasn’t a bad house at all, of course, but a charming little house, our first house, one that we hated to leave when I landed the job at the Dayton Daily News. It was the kind of house in the kind of working-class Cincinnati neighborhood where families used to live for generations.
We had bought the house from my sister, Anne, and it was her husband, Tim Norbut, who built the swing set from a kit for their oldest daughter, Megan, when she was 2 years old. The kit cost $150 — a lot of money for a young family — so Anne and Tim asked my Dad to make the horse swing that would have set them back another $75. “I stayed up late assembling it so Meg could be surprised in the morning on her second birthday,” Tim recalled.
“We could not get her off of the swing set for weeks after she got it. She loved to talk to our neighbor, Karen, as she would swing back and forth. I seem to recall they were rather one-sided conversations. I remember Megan explaining to Karen in great detail that her mom was going to have a baby soon and if it was a girl, she wanted to name her Karen. ”
Anne and Tim were known as “Megan’s parents” since she had befriended everyone on the block by riding her Big Wheel up and down the sidewalk. Megan is 24 now and still carrying on an animated conversation with the world, albeit in the somehow broader setting of New York City.
Alec is finishing his second year at Ohio University, and our middle child, Veronica, has given up swing sets for the likes of swim team and high school theater.
At least, we had the foresight to adopt a much younger child, our daughter NiNi, who has provided us with a lingering farewell to the ways of childhood. The wooden horse swing finally neighed its last, after several repairs, but we installed new swings several years ago, much to the delight of NiNi and her friends.
I don’t know when, but sometime in the past year, the swing set fell as silent as the ghost of childhood past.
The realization hit me just as NiNi was leaving grade school, after six wonderful years at Indian Riffle Elementary School, proud of her new status as a middle-schooler.
Dozens of kids had fought over this swing set over the course of 20 years, most of them now grown or nearly grown. One is gone now, a victim of suicide at 17.
The joys of childhood can’t forestall the challenges and complexities of adult life, it’s true, but I still think that unscheduled playtime holds more value than we know.
Although maybe the memories aren’t as idyllic as I like to imagine. “I mainly remember things that had to do with swinging, like hanging Veronica’s Tinky Winky and shooting it with a squirt gun,” Alec said.
Myson, now 6’1”, shed no tears when he helped to move the swing set to the home of our neighbors, Andrea and Joe Carr, who have two little boys, Charlie, 4, and Henry, 1. “I’m just glad I don’t have to mow around it any more,” Alec said.
A very practical point of view, no doubt. But that’s not my motivation for moving the wooden behemoth, still so sturdy after 22 years of hard usage.
The real reasons are Charlie and Henry, and the happiness of seeing their small sneakered feet pumping high into the air.
Because kids need a swing set.
And a swing set needs kids.