The Swing

and all its subtext

“Are you going to write about this?” the handyman asked. He was pushing me on my new swing. 

“I don’t know. Do you want me to?”

“It seems worthy of it,” he replied.

I had wanted this swing forever. Some yahoo nutcase had put it up incorrectly so that when I tried to swing, I spun in circles, making me nauseous. The handyman said he could fix it, and he did. 

I swung higher, pumping my legs. The handyman stepped aside and watched me, smiling. “There’s nothing like seeing a grown woman get so happy about a swing.” 

I jumped off and stuck the landing, pretty much. “Your turn,” I said.

Some of my earliest memories involve swinging. At the country place where we spent weekends, Dad hung swings from the century-old oak trees which surrounded us like behemoth sentinels. We swung for hours and took turns pushing each other, shaded by the leafy canopies. When we got too hot, we ate ice cold watermelon and spit seeds.

When I was 12, as part of a class assignment, I memorized The Swing by Robert Louis Stevenson: Oh, I do think it the pleasantest thing/Ever a child can do! I can still recite it. 

I called my daughter outside to swing. “If you swing on this for five minutes every day, it’ll change your life,” I told her. I just made that up, but even as the words left my mouth, I knew them to be true.

“It’s true,” said the handyman, because we’re in step like that sometimes. 

The handyman loves trees like I do, maybe a little less because he often cuts them down for a living. But like me, he appreciates the art inherent in the gnarled bark and the way giant limbs can look like people frozen in the sky. One day I came home and there was triangular piece of bark on my front porch. It looked like a hobbit door, complete with a peephole. I knew it was from him. 

Another time, he rescued two metal squat rack poles from a trash heap and installed them in my yard. He found a long straight log to fit between them, creating a hippie garden squat rack. He showed me a video of himself doing squats there.

“I’d like to live in a treehouse,” I told him once. We were taking a break from yard work, eating peanut butter and jelly sandwiches. I always work with him when he comes over to help with the yard because it’s fun. “I guess I’d need help, though,” I continued, “as I got older.”

“I could live in one nearby,” he said. “And we could build a swinging bridge to connect us.” 

In this way, the handyman has endeared himself to me. Though he’s younger than me, he reminds me of my father because of his utter capability. I gotcha, he says often, when I ask him to do something, and the words practically embrace me. 

My goal is to turn my backyard into a jungly kind of bohemian landscape where wood nymphs hide behind trees and butterflies decorate the air like moving artistic creations. I’m getting close. The handyman likes my goal and he applies discounts when he helps me. “Call it a fairy credit,” he said, and a little part of me passed out cold because I loved that so much, and because this man seems to get me in a way few people do. Or maybe I just imagine he does.

 The day he fixed my swing, we later began creating a magical path to nowhere at the back of my property, and it started to drizzle. “I guess we should quit for the day,” I said. 

“I thought you wanted me to hang those solar lights,” he said. 

“Well, I did, but not in the rain.”

He got in his truck. His truck bed contained, among other wayward items, two steam trunks, three rusted propane gas tanks, a petrified tree stump growing mushrooms, and a broom. 

His window was open and he leaned on his elbow. Raindrops splashed into the sweat on his arm. “Bye,” he said.

“Bye,” I said. Neither of us moved for a bit. 

Finally, he drove off slowly, meeting my gaze from his sideview mirror, leaving my feral wonderland for his other life, one presumably filled with the girlfriends he denies having and dull tasks and semi-organized drudgery. To be honest, I don’t really know. For some reason, I care. I feel a tiny pang of loneliness when he leaves.

The drizzle turned into rain. I sat on the swing and pushed myself back as far as I could, then lifted my feet and soared forward. The fresh damp air flew into my lungs and my heart pounded with the sudden joy of it. 

“Are you going to write about this?” he asked. “It seems worthy of it.” Yes. But was he? 

Up in the air I go flying again/, wrote Stevenson. Up in the air and down!