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We gave our trampoline away recently. It had been sitting largely unused for most of the past two years, taking up a formidable amount of space in our little urban backyard, collecting leaves, maple keys and (when "someone" left the net open) the occasional raccoon scat. Yuck. The most use it had seen recently was when little groups of young teenagers would go out there on a nice day, jump nostalgically once or twice, declare it was too small for them now and then lie on their backs looking up at the sky and sharing secrets I wasn't supposed to hear accompanied by shrieks of laughter.
Now, they're even past that; they share their secrets on text, Snapchat and Instagram, all coded in a language only occasionally revealed to uncool parents.
Eight years ago, when the trampoline arrived in a flat box just in time for my daughter's seventh birthday, it was proclaimed the coolest present ever! I remember my Canada Day baby on a brutally hot Canada Day stoically waiting and supervising my sister and brother-in-law while they assembled it.
When they finally finished, likely with undiagnosed cases of heat prostration and extreme dehydration, and for sure one corker of a bruise where a spring snapped back on my brother-in-law, off went my newly minted seven-year-old to try it out. And try it out. And try it out.
That afternoon, she spent four hours on the trampoline without getting off. Relays were formed to ensure she ate something and drank oodles of water. Nothing budged her off the trampoline until it was time to go to a Canada Day event with bouncy castles and fireworks – where she actually jumped some more on the bouncy castle. Predictably, she slept the sleep of the righteous that night. The next morning, she got herself dressed, ate some breakfast and went right back outside to jump some more.
In retrospect, the miracle is that the trampoline survived as long as it did, not to mention the kids who used it.
Even though we had frequent discussions about limiting the number of kids on it, most of the time, when I looked out, there were more kids than could possibly be safe jumping up and down in rhythms of their own, shrieking with laughter at the silly jokes they were telling one another or just at the sheer joy of feeling weightless for a moment.
At one point, on a night when it was actually closed properly, an animal tried to claw its way onto the trampoline, leaving sizable holes at the bottom of the net. A creative babysitter used string and ingenuity to recreate the netting in the damaged areas, making our trampoline unique and thus more special. And the kids kept right on jumping.
Forbidden back flips became the rage some time in Grade 4. Then, the kids invented games that involved throwing a ball onto, off or around the trampoline. Over and over, once the weather was good, little troupes of kids would come to our house, tramp through to the back and start jumping up and down, up and down.
Even in Grade 6, when some of them could jump so high I was worried they'd go over the top, they would still jump and jump and jump. By then, the new trick was to aim water guns and hoses at the trampoliners. I was assured that it was very refreshing, although we did have a long discussion about the safety issues of jumping on a trampoline slick with water. As with most of our other Safety On The Trampoline discussions, it was solemnly listened to and promptly ignored.
Every year brought its own variation of play to the trampoline, but the shrieks and the laughter were a constant.
In a funny way, for me, the trampoline had become a time capsule that had captured precious memories of my daughter's childhood. Separating from it was no big deal for her. She's a consummate pragmatist and, at 15, has her eyes fixed on her present and her future.
To her, the trampoline, as with other pieces of her childhood, form an interesting backdrop to her present but aren't really meaningful any more. For me – the consummate romantic – it was another act of letting go of her childhood and my little baby. Like the picture books, Playmobil and play kitchen we'd already given away, it was another acknowledgment of what everyone told me but that no one really believes when they start down the road of parenthood. You blink and it's done. I wish I'd done one fewer load of laundry and taken my coffee out to the deck more often to watch them jump.
Now, our neighbours behind us who have younger children have our old trampoline. The day it moved to their backyard, all I could hear was the shrieks of laughter from their kids. A little more remote but still one of the best sounds around.
For us, there is now a big round patch of dirt that sits like the ghost of our old trampoline and waits to become a fire pit. My daughter, who shares my love of decorating shows, has produced several prototypes of fire pit areas for me to consider. She's right. I need to do something with the big patch of nothing and, if I'm lucky, she'll go out there with her friends and sit in the chairs we haven't bought yet to look at the fire contraption we haven't decided on yet and share secrets and laugh away. This time, I'm going to take my coffee and sneak out onto the deck and revel in it. The laundry can wait.
Celia Hitch lives in Toronto.