“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!”

Robert Louis Stevenson

I love the little poem in A Child’s Garden of Verses from which these lines are drawn. I recited it on stage at age six and read it often to our girls when they were young. Lines from it pop into my head whenever I go “up in a swing” myself.

Maybe it’s the residual kid in me but I still like to swing. There’s something about moving through the air, seeing the landscape from such a moveable perch, that is uniquely satisfying. Movement enhances vision, I suppose.

Of course, swinging doesn’t come as easily as it used to. It isn’t that I can’t pump my legs or move my arms. It’s that swinging gives me motion sickness. After a few minutes I have to hop off until the world stops spinning.

But the pleasure is worth the pain. There are few activitiess that provide as direct a link to childhood as this one. So I found a two-swing set in a neighborhood to our south. It’s tucked away in the woods (notice I’m not divulging the exact location), and it does not have a ridiculous sign like this one. There I can swing to my heart’s content and my head’s tolerance. Which means about, oh, five minutes or so.