For my fifth birthday I received a huge swing set, I’ve been wanting one for a long time, really my whole life. It had three swings one for me, my one year old sister Livi, and Jenna who was about two months away from being born. There were two challenging rock walls, where if you fell you might have died from landing in the lava. A rope ladder that we would climb pretending we were on the very top of the pirate ship. The binoculars and pirate ship wheel in the inside of the swing set was the base of the ship. Looking through the binoculars you can see the green grass turn into the dark blue ocean. Underneath there was a sandpit that had many purposes at first: a sandpit to play in then, in the winter a mini skating rink, and lastly a litterbox for the stray cat that decided it was theirs now. Last but not least a forest green, smiley-face-sticker-covered, slide In second grade I wanted to cover the whole slide in stickers, I only managed to cover a small part at the top. 

The amount of time I’ve spent on that swing set seems like most of my childhood. As I grew older so did the swingset, it changed with me. When I started doing gymnastics my grandpa gave me a yellow bar with triangles hanging off so I could practice doing flips. When my sisters and I were too old to use the binoculars and pirate wheel we took them off. It was too “babyish” for us. We walked out of the garage with my dad’s screwdriver and took it off. My parents didn’t know at first and eventually didn’t care. But those stickers lasted through the rain and snow all those years up until I had to say goodbye to the swing set. We were moving to Williamsville and my friends mom who was buying our house was planning on taking it down. It was very sad to say goodbye to my childhood.