Megan Hanlon
Dear Wooden Swing Set,
Steadfast and reliable, you have been my friend during these long short years.
Together we’ve passed many damp mornings and long-shadowed afternoons: you, the sturdy fixture that invited my children to crawl on your limbs and hang from your dreams; me, the pusher of bucket swings and the soft landing at the bottom of the slide.
As they grew under your wooden outline, they became astronauts and aliens, pirates, gymnasts, and more – and I slipped from participant to audience. While I watched, you taught them to climb and fall and get up again, take turns, entertain each other, and imagine as big as the cloudless sky.
How they adored your dark teal glider that held them back-to-back. Its handles, shaped like a Cheshire cat face, reminded me daily that children are illogical and maddening and wondrous.
Your grass-green swings they pumped to and fro, slalomed side to side, twisted into tight spirals, and let loose to spin in circles so dizzy it’s a wonder no one threw up. On you their swinging arcs were like deep grins, first low to the ground then higher with each bright summer until I thought they’d fly away.
My children gleefully coasted down (and stumbled up) your slide in sunshine and snow, under water hose and bloodied chin that required the emergency room. When it cracked where plastic attached to wood, and a chunk fell out like a lost baby tooth, I should have recognized it as the harbinger it was.
Change has a way of spreading slowly. Your nubby captain’s wheel once steered to outer space, but has fallen into stillness. Your spyglass sprouted cobweb cataracts and became blind to the inches they’ve grown. One ladder step to the clubhouse has long been cracked lengthwise, but still it refuses to let go.
I understand that reluctance. It’s bittersweet to accept that a loved thing which seemed bigger than time changed when you weren’t paying attention. Once, I was the only one who had to stoop and crawl beneath your tented canvas shelter, the only one whose twice-stretched hips were too wide for the thrill of the waved slide. Now, one child is too tall to stand under your shade, and the other is close behind.
My stoic backyard neighbor, this stage of life is drawing to an end.
I feel your sadness, for I too am being outgrown.
They no longer need my hands to steady their gliding or push their slender backs toward the sky. They swing, jump, and walk away on their own now after so many days wanting me near – leaving me nowhere to put all this love, leaving me both empty and full.
They are pulling away from us like sticky gum, stretching father and farther but not completely gone. Not yet, anyway.
The children still visit you now and again. But those moments of joy are so infrequent that robins tried to build a nest in your corner last spring, and had to be chased out. Maybe you welcomed this sweet family-to-be because they soothed your loneliness, in which case I’m sorry. I bet you miss feeling like home.
I know mine weren’t your first. Twice before you entertained wide-eyed and wild siblings, then silently watched them walk away. I don’t know how you withstood the loss and the longing. I can see the nostalgia you keep hidden in the cracks of your 4×4 posts, which have settled deep into our ground. Oh, how you’ve earned those fractures.
When that sorrowful time comes to say goodbye, we’ll dismantle you like a mother falling apart because little hands no longer reach for her. Gently we’ll shepherd you to whatever the next season holds – the love of different children, or perhaps the peace of a well-deserved rest.
I promise you’ll not be forgotten. Decades from now, as they’re pushing my grandchildren on different swings, they’ll hear echoes of their own laughter from the years you stood in our grass and watched time tick by.
Megan Hanlon is a podcast producer who sometimes writes. Her words have appeared in Anti-Heroin Chic, Write or Die Magazine, Variant Literature, Gordon Square Review, MUTHA Magazine, and other publications both online and print. Her blog, “Sugar Pig,” is known for relentlessly honest essays that are equal parts tragedy and comedy.