The Wheelchair Swing The Men Built

The boy who used to fly

You have to understand what that swing set meant, to know why those words landed on me the way they did.

Wes had built it the summer Toby turned four. Two swings, a little slide, and a top bar painted red.

One of the swings was just a flat strap seat on two chains, and Toby loved it the way some children love a thing with their whole body.

He would pump those skinny legs until the chains went slack at the top and snapped tight again, and I would stand at my kitchen window and holler across two yards for him to slow down.

He never slowed down. He would lean his head all the way back so the whole world turned upside down, and he would laugh at the sky.

That was the boy. He was motion. He was a blur going by on that bicycle, a splash at the pool, a pair of feet pounding up and down this street from May to September.

So when his mother told me he had asked when he could swing again, I understood she was not telling me about a swing.

She was telling me her boy still believed there was a version of his life with flying in it, and she did not know how to tell him there was not.

That strap seat still hung in their backyard. It hung there empty all through July, turning a little in the wind.

Every time I walked past their fence I saw it, and every time it felt like a small accusation aimed at nobody in particular.

A boy two doors down wanted to fly again, and the thing that used to carry him up was a thing he could no longer so much as climb into.

I am not a woman who believes much can be fixed with good intentions. I am too old for that.

But I lay awake that night, and I thought about that empty seat turning in the dark, and by morning I had stopped thinking about it as a sad thing.

I had started thinking about it as a problem. And a problem is a different animal. A problem you can get your hands around.

I did not know the first thing about building a swing a wheelchair could use. I had never held a power drill in my life.

What I knew was that I had lived on this street for forty years, and that a street is not just houses. It is people who owe each other nothing and show up anyway.