Early Days’ Paradise
In the mornings of childhood, especially on weekends when there was no school, I would go out to my backyard with my little sister. The trees stood still while the light from the sun crept through the leaves, making a collage of dark and light green grass as I walked towards my swing set. Dew dressed all of the red plastic and metal, and sent a shiver down my spine as the wetness touched the skin of my legs as I sat at the top of the slide. I thought to myself that I may as well have dried the red, shiny plastic with my own shorts than with anything else if I really wanted to use it. Mornings like this created an overflow of ideas in my imagination, and I created entire worlds with just a sway on my swing set or a step inside my tree house.
After a slide or two I would always move on to the magical car, or spaceship, or anything I wanted that swing to be. A type of swing that I could either use alone or share with my sister, it too was made with shiny red plastic. Whenever I rocked to and fro and made the apparatus become my spaceship, it shook the rest of the swing set into a frenzy as the other contraptions on it twitched at the disturbance I created. The wind I caught while using this swing whipped my short hair back and forth and created the sensation of driving down the fast lane of a racecar track.
Next to the “spaceship” was the less frequently used metal bar. Neither I nor my little sister knew how to hang our legs over one of these types of cold, plain rectangles that hung down and swung, so we rarely used it. If we ever would, we would just tuck in our feet and use our hands; the cold thin bar chafing our hands until they turned as red as the metal.
To the right of the pointless hanging device were the two classic swings. My sister and I would spend many hours talking and swinging and jumping off these swings as they flew us up into the sky. We would close our eyes and let them take us anywhere we wanted to go, with the sun beams sneaking through the leaves of the trees and dancing on our faces as we let our heads hang back and, and we dreamt of being in an airplane or helicopter.
Last but not least, was the glider. My sister and I would never know what it was actually called and mistakenly called it a sea-saw on many occasions, but we used it constantly. Another contraption that posed as a vehicle in many games we played, it transported us to any type of place we wanted to go. It groaned as the primarily metal device swung back and forth, and along with the incessant giggling and chatter my sister and I created, nothing else could be heard on those quiet weekend mornings.
While my little sister and I would be running around the yard, the wet grass tickled our shins as we raced this way and that. On the other side of the backyard, towered the fortress that was the tree house. It wasn’t completely a tree house in that it merely sat upon large wooden stilts and only a small tree slithered through part of it, but for my sister and I, it was the tree mansion. The front porch led to the door inside our dream house, which was not actually as big as my sister and I made it seem. Unattractive evergreen-colored carpet covered the floor, and a table sat near one of the three giant windows that displayed the rest of the wonderful backyard and woods that was occupied on mornings such as these. The wood that made up the walls also had places that served as shelves for random plants, pots and toys that we kept there. An extra stair led out to the back porch, where you wouldn’t just see the rest of the backyard, but the entire world. It floated high above the rest of the neighborhood, creating a view that stretched all the way to the mountains. The leaves of the tree that was inside the tree house created a pretend roof of the back porch, making a cozy alcove that held tightly all the secrets my sister and I exchanged up there. The wood creaked below our feet with every step we took, and the smell of wood and trees loomed there when you opened the door to look inside. For my sister and I, it was our house, headquarters, fortress, castle, and mansion.
The backyard on those weekend mornings was the magical land of whatever my sister and I dreamt up in our head at the time. Its silence was the backdrop to the endless days of laughter, chatter and stories told. The swing set was the number of vehicles that flew us up into the sky, while the tree house was the bastion that was the place we always ended up. The wet, dew-covered grass was nature’s soft carpet that my sister and I ran around on and crafted the beautiful tales and memories that won’t ever be forgotten.