Childhood story...
When my brother and I were elementary schoolish of age my dad built a teeter totter for us in the backyard. I don't know why, we must have nagged him for one, and the prospect of creating his own must have caught his fancy. (Total goofy dad kind of stuff.) It consisted of a football field length plank of wood attached to a make shift metal bar contraption in the center that was rooted somehow to the ground. Oh, and the handles were made of pvc piping. (Very healthy and safe--this was the 70's people.) It was a mammoth sized teeter totter: scary, completely unsafe and...crazy fun. It would certainly not meet playground safety standards of this day and age, and there were many of us that...shall we say... had the teeter knocked out of our totters. (i.e.--busted open faces and torn limbs from flipping over the handle bars and falling the twenty feet to the ground.) Serious teetering was happening folks--it was not made for wimps. (I am totally giggling as I write this.)
When we weren't busy feeling our legs fly into the air (sometimes over our heads--seriously), or pulling splinters from our tooshes, we would take the fallen (sometimes rotten), lemons from the backyard lemon tree, place them perfectly on the ground underneath our teeter seats, and the proceed to teeter and totter to maximum speeds so that we could come racing down upon them and feel them burst open upon contact. It was our very own brand of juicing. We created quite a mess and often left them split open and littered upon the grass for my mom to find...at which point we would then receive quite the mom scolding.
As you can imagine, the teeter did not have a very long life. My dad eventually yanked it out (geez, I don't know why?!) and we were left with a hole in the backyard, and dead patches of grass where our seats had mashed the grass into two bald spots.
We were left with the very exciting lemon tree. But that was eventually pulled out as well.
Our backyard shenanigans put to halt.
No more teetering and tottering, killing our friends, depleting the neighborhood lemon source.
Good memories, friends. Good memories. :)
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