Smacked out of Childhood

“Margy and Bri, wanna go on the tire swing with me?” I asked breathlessly. I’d just run to the screened front porch of the cabin after grocery shopping with mom, sure I was missing out.

All the older cousins went silent. My siblings’ ears turned red. I shouldn’t have used their nicknames in front of the others.

“We’re just going to hang out here,” Margy said through gritted teeth. Brian started talking to cousin Andy again, pretending he hadn’t heard me.

“What are you doing?”

“Just talking.”

“Just talking?” I wrinkled my nose. “That’s so boring! Don’t you want to play on the swing?” I pouted.

Margy was unfazed by the pout that had worked so well before I had gotten braces and started to put on, what my mom called, “the weight from becoming a woman.”

“Go and play on the swing by yourself if you want!”

“Fine!”

I ran out of the porch, around the cabin, to the field in the back.  The tire swing beckoned before me. My step grandpa had made it by hanging huge old tractor tire on ropes some twenty feet below a massive old oak tree.

I pushed the tire until it swung to an appropriate height. Then I took a running leap and launched myself onto the swing, thudding my stomach painfully on the tire’s rim. The tire turned vertical with my weight and I managed to pull myself up on the ropes, feeling like I was in a Mission Impossible movie. The swing lost some momentum, so I pulled myself to a standing position on the rim of the tire and hung on to the ropes. By pumping my legs and pulling on the ropes, I could get the swing to go even higher. Take that Margy and Brian! I don’t need you! I thought.

When the swing swung to its highest point, it made my body go horizontal. The ropes cut into my hands and the sudden pain made me let go: I slipped off and crashed down ten feet into the dirt. The thud knocked the wind out of me. Stunned, I struggled to take a gasping breath and sat up.  

“Thwack!”

I was hit in the back of my head by the tire swing, clobbered to the ground.

Head throbbing and lungs burning, I belly-crawled a good twenty feet until I was clear from the swing.

I stood up and rubbed my throbbing head, feeling the sore spot where a goose egg was already growing. I moped back to the porch. Maybe I was getting too old to play with swings. Maybe it was time to hang out with the teenagers.