The Wheels on the Ropes Go Round and Round

14/3/13
The new tire-swings sit red and glittery in the early morning sun. They've been painted and put up over the weekend, and today will be the kids' first exposure to the new play equipment. There's one hung horizontally from three ropes. That's the main attraction. The other is hung on end, and mostly serves as a staging ground for the next in line.

It's funny how quickly the kids teach each other the ways of the tire, how almost instinctive it is to tuck in and focus on the spinning circle of dirt between your feet; how leaning out and pulling in at the right time speeds the spin. I'm flooded with memories of tire-swings dotted across the landscape of my childhood. How sometimes it was fun to push—and sometimes you'd squabble bitterly over the last remaining seat.

One of the girls is older, and she's had tire-swing experience. She knows how to rock the tire and its occupants back and forth, how to push to the limit of her height, before twisting and pulling on one rope to impart a pendulum whirl that turns her passengers' world into a twirling top. She giggles and leaps out of the way as those aboard stare between their feet or at each other with fascinated horror, feeling the forces and physics they can't begin to comprehend. It's just the magic of the world all around.

After the spirals exhaust themselves, I challenge the riders to dismount and walk along the narrow caterpillar made from vertical tires sunk in the playground dirt. They all laugh and stagger and fall, as the earth tilts beneath their feet and the sky heaves overhead. They exaggerate their drunkenness and collapse in paroxysms of laughter, falling over each other and rolling gleefully in the red sand that has given their white-shirt uniforms some playful character.

I smile somewhat wanly, thinking of the belly-lurching, the vision reeling, the head swimming. An image pops up, of a bygone babysitter telling my parents how sickening it was to watch us spin round and round on our carousel-seesaw combo. In skeptical seven-year-old scorn, I turned away from him in disgust and vowed never to grow up. I remember trundling barefoot through the grass, staring at the sky and twirling in tight circles until we fell down in ecstasy as the "spins" thrilled up our spines. The days of dervish delight.

For love of the game, I extend recess well beyond reason, almost 'til Home Time. The kids take turns on the swing, adjusting each other for weight distribution, laughing and falling all over each other in tangles, with utter disregard for class, socio-economics, race, age, or gender. They don't know or care about the stir their school may be causing in what board meetings where. They don't know or care that this little dirt school yard is the talk of the town, though there's not even a sign by the entrance yet. They're just kids playing with tires hung from a branch under a wide open African sky.