On Destroying My Childhood Swing Set with a Saw

As metaphors for growing up go, carving up a swing set you got when you were seven is pretty hard to beat. Everything about the experience, really, just screamed SYMBOLISM!

I was around eighteen. Some of the exact details escape me. I know that it wasn’t done in a fit of rage. Childhood rarely ends so dramatically. No, my parents were putting the house I grew up in up for sale. The swing set was over a decade old, and we hadn’t kept up so well with the weatherproofing, and it just had to go. Originally we were going to dig up the stakes that had placed it in the ground and carry the whole thing to the curb to be hauled away, those bad boys were in compacted clay, and it just wasn’t happening. Then we thought about disassembling the thing, but between some rust and the weirdly shaped bolts, we just didn’t have the tools for the job. What we did have were a couple of saws.

We got the swing set shortly after moving into a house nearly two thousand miles away from our previous home, and we knew no one in the area. The swing set was a short set of monkey bars going over the actual swings (you were supposed to use one or the other, not both at the same time, but rules weren’t my forte). There was a slide, a knotted climbing rope, and at the top of the whole thing was a small fort with a trapdoor and a tarp roof. By the time we returned from school on the day it was installed, it was pouring rain. I went outside anyway, weaving schemes and plans about what that fort would be used for: camping, water balloon wars, installing a TV via extension cords. Before long I was back inside. The tarp roof still left two sides enclosed by wooden bars, but otherwise open to the elements. My desperate glee for a swing set I’m fairly certain I begged for lasted about ten minutes.

The main thing about dismantling a wooden swing set with a cheap saw is that the work is slow, so it gives you time to think. That first day with the swing set really set the tone for the rest of its existence. It was great fun in short bursts, and then completely forgotten. My dreams for the fort never came to fruition. Nature crept in fast. One day when I was around ten, a wasp had set up residence inside. For about an hour, my siblings and I waged war on that single wasp. We tried to destroy it from a safe distance with ice cubes, a soccer ball, and eventually a hose. The wasp stood its ground. After that, I emotionally ceded the territory. As you grow up, a swing set starts to look sadder and sadder: less used, creakier when it finally is, and a constant reminder of more carefree days. It’s also a terrific symbol of my childhood because I appreciated it so little at the time. It was expensive, a gift freely given by my parents to enjoy with my siblings and stay active, and within three years I was actively choosing to watch infomercials on TV rather than use the darn thing. It’s easy to feel entitled as a child in my part of the world. Only as an adult can I see the price tags and the organizational effort it took for my parents to give me all the pieces necessary to a happy childhood (with very little assembly required.)

Looking back on childhood once you leave it often produces a dull, aching feeling. The feeling is usually attributed to the heart, but I just so happened to feel it in my bicep as we strategically cut away the monkey bars, and toppled the rest like Godzilla taking down Osaka, Japan. And while part of me felt sympathy for the swing set that day, part of me was actively enjoying destroying it, because I knew an analogy when I lived one, and this one meant I was growing up. Childhood is a swing set. Adolescence is a saw. Adulthood is remembering the boy down the block who desperately wanted a swing set, and had to look at its carcass as we piled it in the gutter.