Kelsey is away at college. Zane is a high school junior. Zack is in fifth grade. Surely we should see a slowing down in the accumulation of kid-stuff. Perhaps we should even be seeing a decrease in kid-stuff, like snow melting or something.
And yet I look out the back window as see a giant trampoline. Oh, the trampoline.
The trampoline came to live in the backyard during the Christmas of 2007. Our last house was basically built into the side of a hill, so we never had enough flat space to have a trampoline. When we moved into this house in October of 2007, we decided Kelsey was finally going to get the bouncy enclosure she'd long for all those years.
It was huge and heavy and pretty expensive for our family budget, but it happened. As Jimmy began to set it up, it dawned on us that this yard isn't as level as it looks from the window of the family room. So half the trampoline ended up buried in a trench and the other half is above ground. I hate that trampoline.
The kids jumped on it relentlessly from about December through March. Then spring came, and the clearing covered with leaves. And poison ivy sprouted. And running bamboo emerged. And snakes ventured forth. And spiders dropped in. And the trampoline became a different sort of hazard.
The enclosure took care of the falling-off aspect, but it also made for arena worthy of Hunger Games-hazard status. There might have even been a tracker-jacker nest nearby. At any rate, there was a yellow jacket nest close to where you'd step to climb into the enclosure opening.
That was the spring of 2008. This is the winter of 2013. And there sits the trampoline, covered in dead leaves and mildew and ice, at the moment. The only living thing I've seen down there in the past six months is a hawk that regularly uses the metal safety net frame as a perch for hunting snakes and mice. (When he catches a snake, he slurps it down like a spaghetti noodle. It both fascinating and disgusting at the same time.)
In June of 2012, I put two padlocks on the enclosure net at the request of an insurance agent with whom we were researching coverage. She said the pool and trampoline would have to have locks. The pool already had the required locking fence gates. I bought to little padlocks to guarantee trampoline compliance. Those locks have not be unlocked since that day.
To me, that says that we don't use the trampoline, and it can disappear. I am alone in that opinion.
Other than getting rid of the wall of plastic lawn toys (not lawn ornaments... those are treasures) lining the lower half of the driveway, nothing would thrill me more than to get rid of the rotting trampoline. It's half-buried anyway. I'm a little at a loss as to why 80% of the people in this house object to vehemently to getting rid of it.
OK, not really. It was a LOT of work to dig a trench that levels the trampoline next to the creek on the back edge of our property. Who wants to undo that? And those four months of jumping glory were epic. Plus, it's actually one of the last vestiges of middle-schoolness for our girl. I get all that. And yet, I'm thinking that it may make a tremendously fun addition to one sorority house in Chapel Hill.
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