Swingset Break

This is definitely not the best photo I've ever posted, but I figure we could all use something whimsical right about now.

Forgive us our trespassers...

I haven't done it (yet,) but I am tempted to jump over the fence and stretch out in that tree swing...

Who's with me?

Swingers

You know, nothing say home sweet home quite like a wholesome scene of dormer windows, a shade tree and a tire swing.

Um, yeah. About that tire swing...

My first thought pegged it as something out of an old German expressionist film but, upon reflection, maybe it's actually a hobby horse. (From an old German expressionist film?) South Pas is definitely kooky enough to inspire a photographic series on unusual swings and things.

Or maybe they just always wanted a second story bedroom...

This is turning into a series...

So, the accountant/endocrinologist from yesterday's post must have a grandmother who lives across town in this house. And maybe the story goes something like this:

For years Grandpa must have wondered why Granny was so distant, so unreachable ... until he found the box on the top shelf of her closet. It was the one with all those pictures of a young Granny next to Johnny Weissmuller on the set of a Tarzan movie. She'd been a contract studio player then, an aspiring starlet, and she gave it all up to marry Grandpa.

He would finally show her that he understood her. After all these years, he'd be the man she always wanted! And thus ... the hammock. Placed (with great love) high in the trees of a little suburban jungle.

That's the best I've got. My other explanation involved pole vaulters. Anyone else want to take a crack at figuring out why this hammock is 7 feet off the ground?

In the Swing of Things

Hmmmm. I just can't help but speculate on the backstory here. Dig this:

Perhaps the homeowner always wanted a tree swing when he was a boy but his parents never let him have one. So he vowed that when he had little ones of his own he would give them everything he never had. But the children never came, and the tree kept growing, so the man kept changing out the rope, year after year, hoping that maybe someday...

No, that's too depressing.

Maybe the owner is a hardworking, well-respected professional -- an accountant or endocrinologist -- and he always says the same thing when people ask about the swing. "Came with the house," he laughs. "Just can't bear to take it down." But late at night, after he's put away the suit and the Blackberry, after the rest of the neighborhood has gone to sleep, he becomes a secret trapeze artist, flying brilliantly over the street in the wee small hours, lit only by moonbeams, porch lamps, and the glowing passion of the insomniac widow next door who watches from her kitchen window...

But then again, I tend to idealize. It's just a swing, right?