When I was eight years old, my parents bought a tiny cottage in Door County, Wisconsin.
We had jet skis and a boat, tubes and waterskis, fishing poles, a volleyball net and even kickball bases. But my favorite thing was the little yellow swing.
I’m the oldest of four – and the only girl – so I’ve spent the time I was left alone (or needed to be alone) on the swing that hung from a huge tree not even two feet from our front porch.
At age eight, I would sing to myself as I swung back and forth. No cares, no worries.
But as the years went on, life changed a lot.
Mom and Dad let me buy a CD player in fifth grade. So I sat on my swing, plugged my big Sony headphones into the jack and listened to Stacie Orrico’s album on repeat.
When I turned 13, I got my first iPod – a first generation Nano. I sat on my swing and listened to my “tennis pump-up” playlist created from my tiny iTunes library.
Then, a few more years passed, and I got an iPod that held all of my 60,000+ songs. I still sat on my swing, and I still jammed out, this time to Ciara and Missy Elliott.
But fast forward to May 2014. Because I would be living in Spain for the next two months, I went up north with Dad so I could get my single dose of the cottage before I missed out on an entire summer at my favorite place.
I helped prep the cottage for summer, but I had to end the day on my swing.
I’d grown so much that I almost didn’t fit on the seat, my music was playing from my phone, and my headphones were streaming questionable music via Bluetooth connection. Things were so different from the eight-year-old kid that sang out loud.
That was the only time I went up to my cottage this year. And before I knew it, I was driving back to college as a senior.
My parents had been planning for a while to update our cottage – windows, walls, plants—but the text I got came as a surprise.
Cutting down my tree was never part of the plan.
Branches were trimmed annually to avoid potential damages, but I never saw it as a big enough problem to get rid of it entirely. It wasn’t some nuisance of a natural disaster, it was my go-to.
Now, my little yellow swing is lying on a shelf in the shed, and my tree has become firewood lying under a tarp collecting dirt until we burn it next summer.
The hardest part of growing up isn’t the curiosity of what lies ahead, but rather the fear of leaving things behind. It’s horrifying to turn around and realize you can’t go back that way —to know that what once was a tree is now just a wallpaper photo and a memory.
So while I’ve got to find a new place to hang my swing, I realize that letting go of the comfortable in order to embrace the possible is what I need to do to progress forward.
Maybe next summer — just maybe — I’ll take my swing and hang it from the branches of the oak tree next to our neighbors’ cottage. After all, their little 8-year-old girl has a lot of learning left to do. And I think it would be good for her to take a trip to Neverland on a little yellow swing, too.
