Swings on the High Plains

One June I took my love who would be my wife up from the Iowa prairie to see the High Plains. In the evening we came to a small town in western Nebraska whose name I can’t remember. It must have been suppertime, its single street was empty and so was the little park on a green rise, with a bench, a bronze memorial plaque, and a swing set.

We were young and the low sun was still warm and red on our faces, so we went to the swings and rode them very high, as high as the chains and gravity would allow— all the way out all the way back— only the slow metronome creak of the swings’ wooden beam, and our silhouettes on the horizon, as though there were just the two of us on the wide breadth of the Plains. Among a few things, this remains.