Throwback Thursday: Swing of Death

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This week, while I’m on vacation, I’ll be blogging from my phone. Expect some weak editing. But go ahead and judge. I’ll be in a beach chair soaking up the sun with my toes in the water.

You would let your kids do this, right?

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This is my brother on a swing at my grandparents’ house when we were young. We would take off from a hill that you can’t see in the picture and fly out across a driveway lined with steel poles that helped store firewood. (You can see them jutting upward in the bottom of the picture.)

For a height reference, note that our mom and our uncle are standing on the ground by the house. Sometimes, we would shift our take-off spot over a bit so that we could slam our feet into the brown building (always referred to as “the shop”) and kick off as hard as we could.

Both the house and the swing are merely memories now. I cannot imaging letting my kids do this, but I have to say that this swing is one of my all-time favorite memories of childhood. We spent hours every summer on it, as did our mom and her siblings 25 years before that. The rope was strong and tied well by our navy-officer grandfather. We never feared for our safety, although it obviously wasn’t really safe.

I’m thankful to my parents for letting us take this risk because just thinking of this swing brings me joy. It’s the closest I’ve ever come to flying.

And, yes, my brother is wearing a cape. Wouldn’t you?

1 thought on “Throwback Thursday: Swing of Death

  1. Jan McClintock

    Uncle D and I spent quite a few minutes going through a list of the “dangerous” things we did when we were kids after reading this post. What fun! Not only did we all spend countless hours on the big swing, but climbing huge trees, studying rattlesnakes, clambering under bridges, hiking along cliffs, and who knows what else. However, we had common sense and good examples to keep us from getting hurt or doing something stupid. Too bad so many children today have neither.

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