Hard as it may be to believe, our staid yard used to be home to a zipline that provided ours of entertainment for our daughter and her friends. This Fantastic Friday post shows how a tree, a clothes hanger, a toy, and two creative little girls can make memories to last a lifetime.
Bye, Bye, Barbie Zipline
In last Friday’s post about the felling of a huge sugar maple in our yard, I neglected to mention a major repercussion of the grand tree’s demise.
The Barbie zip line is no more.
Yes, you read that right. The Barbie zip line. Anne’s Barbie zip line, to be exact. Of course, it hasn’t seen much action in the last decade, but in it’s day, my daughter’s rope and clothes hanger contraption provided hours of entertainment.
At the time I wondered why Anne and her friends kept running in and out of the house.
Turns out, the little girls, many of them Anne’s cousins, had taken the screen out of her second floor bedroom window. It was located about six feet below the peak of the highest roof in the above picture. She and her partners in crime creativity would then throw a long rope out the window, and finally run downstairs and outside to tie the end of the rope around the huge trunk of the old sugar maple. Then they would run back upstairs, strap Barbie dolls to metal clothes hangers and send them down the zip line. Once all the Barbie’s had succumbed to gravity’s relentless pull, the girls would clump down the stairs, and run outside to retrieve the Barbies and haul them back upstairs for another ride.
Had I known, I would ended their fun, worried the girls might fall out the window.
But, I didn’t investigate too closely since they happy since they were occupied so I could do my own thing–work on scrapbooks or freeze meals for the start of school. Besides, none of the children fell out the window, and they still giggle and grin when the subject of Barbie zip lines and bungee jumping Barbies (that’s a subject for another post) enters the conversation.
Today, looking out the window at the fallen tree, I’m homesick for the Barbie zip line days.
I miss my summer-tan little girl flashing her self-conscious smile as she runs past me and out the door. I miss her little friends saying, “Hi, Mrs, Philo!” and her cousins yelling, “Aunt Jo, this is so much fun!” as they rush by. I miss Anne’s tissue boxes lined with torn paper used to house her Beanie Babies. I miss her tempera paint all over the bathroom sink.
Those days are long gone, but until Friday the Barbie zip line tree stood tall.
Why, I wonder, as I lean my head against the window and gaze at the fallen memories littering my front yard, do the best things have to end?
