Tire Swing

Nineteen years ago, I stood with my high school JROTC class around a massive tire swing during an annual festival, pushing hoards of small children. Dressed in wildly-colored hair and faux-punk clothing, and portraying the free-spirit of a seventeen-year-old girl secretly holding down the weight of the world with her feet. Next to me was a barely eighteen-year-old man, one month away from leaving for the Army, and the future father of my firstborn daughter.

We ran wild throughout that festival, creating art with both our hands and our hearts, letting go of all the worries we didn't quite have the answers to yet and willing ourselves to just be children one last time. I'd just met him, and my young teenage heart told me there was a destiny there. At the time, I believed it was to be in love. Now, I know it was to create love.

And now, nineteen years- what feels like lifetimes- later, I see it sitting in that very same tire swing. The high schoolers aren't there anymore, and the hoards of children have dwindled down to half a dozen, but the dads that were high schoolers nineteen years ago still push the children in that swing, still protect their heads as they stand atop it's cables, and still use all of their might to slow it for another young future to cautiously leap into. I look up from the grass I'm photographing from, and I see the love that was created staring down at me with the most beautiful smile in the world, and I know without a doubt, this is exactly how it's supposed to be.