Swinging from a ponderosa: On internal senses and existential root balls

Physical things—like trees and swings—tell our internal senses where we are in this world. What happens when those things are moved?

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“I remembered that milk after I had forgotten everything else.”
– Neil Gaiman, The Ocean at the End of the Lane

In the midst of all the craziness of moving this summer, we had a reunion with the two girls we fostered in 2016 shortly after James was placed with us. Lindsey and the girls’ mom reconnected on Facebook, started texting, and set up a playdate at a park. And it happened. It really happened. They talked and hugged and played and enjoyed each other. We didn’t think this would ever happen. It was amazing and special and healing and deserves way more words than I am going to give it today.

In all of the reunion-ing, Lindsey told the girls that we had moved, and they were a little bit sad about that. Their very first question was about the platform swing, the yellow rectangle one we hung from a branch of the ponderosa pine tree in our backyard. The one that was just wide enough to fit three kids on it.

They needed to know: “Do you still have the swing?”

So there I am. At the house that used to be my home and is now our rental property. I am scrambling to finish last-minute fixes and clean-up before the renter moves in. I am doing it by myself because Lindsey has COVID. It’s two days since Granddad Jake died. There I am, on the first Saturday in June, patching holes, painting, re-caulking the master bathtub. Doing very landlord-y things. I am exhausted and disoriented. The last thing I have to do is to take down the swings hanging from the ponderosa pine tree in our backyard.

The last thing I want to do is to take down the swings hanging from the ponderosa pine tree in our backyard.

I wept as I did it. Ugly crying beneath the ponderosa pine tree in our old backyard.

There was a swing for infants with one of those buckle harnesses. There was a normal, every-day swing that all of our kids learned to “pump” on. And there was that yellow rectangle platform swing that all of our kids could fit on when they were 3-year-olds and 4-year-olds and 5-year-olds and even 6-year-olds.

Have I mentioned the ponderosa pine tree in our backyard? This tree may have been the best thing about our old house. (I’m confused about which verb tense to use. It’s not my home anymore, it still exists, and it’s more “former” than “old.” The tree is still there, but it is now a past-tense thing in my life. Language matters but sometimes language is inadequate.) It is probably at least 150 years old. It takes three of me to hug its trunk. It is stately and grand and much taller than the house and smells like the mountains. My parents, and even Granddad, always said how much they loved that tree when they visited. This is the same tree that provided shade for guests at both of our adoption parties. If Bilbo Baggins had been from the American West, this ponderosa would have been his party tree.

The platform swing hurt the most to take down. All of our kids—foster and adopted—spent countless hours on that swing. We have pictures and videos of our kids lying side-by-side-by-side on the platform swing in pine-tree diffused mid-morning light, about to doze off. Some evenings after dinner, Lindsey and I would stretch out on that swing and look up at the sky through the ponderosa branches or at our kids as they played in the yard. When I think of our first home, of that yard, there’s a composite image in my mind of the world seen from my back, with kids running through buffalo grass, and the flowers are bright and the sun is setting through the pine needles. My toe could just reach the ground when I laid on the swing, and I’d push off the bare dirt and feel the space-time continuum slow itself ever so subtly as I swayed, suspended, two feet above the earth.

Humans have five primary or external senses: sight, smell, hearing, touch, and taste. We also have three internal senses: vestibular, proprioceptive, and tactile. The internal senses help interpret and monitor the sensory cues we get from the external senses. Tactile should be pretty self-explanatory. But the vestibular and proprioceptive senses are not as well known.

The vestibular system is designed to give us balance and proper orientation in space. It is concerned with keeping us in a right relationship with gravity. The proprioceptive system guides our body’s sense of location and orientation and movement of our muscles and joints. It helps us to know where the parts of our bodies are, literally, in relation to other parts of our body. Combined, and when functioning properly, these internal systems help to ground our bodies in reality. They are way-finding signs for our bodies, and thus for our hearts and minds.

Kids from hard places often experience sensory processing delays or disorders. Trauma, neglect, and abuse throw these internal systems out of whack. For these kids, many “behavioral problems” are not behavioral; they are sensorial. Constant fidgeting, touching any and everything, chewing on clothes, seeming generally distracted—these are signs that the child is trying to ground herself in space and time. It is common for kids from hard places to seek (or avoid) unique forms of sensory stimulation because they are trying to kickstart a system that is failing them. And when parents or caregivers react to these actions as behaviors needing to be corrected (or only as behaviors that need to be corrected), they are also failing the kids.

In our TBRI training, Lindsey and I learned about these systems and how to provide a “sensory diet” for kids to help them regulate their senses and ground themselves in the world. This includes lots of things, depending on the sense you’re trying to stimulate or calm. Swinging our kids on that platform swing underneath the ponderosa was a kind of vestibular / proprioceptive therapy. The rhythm of the swing, the comforting press of a sibling lying next to you, the reception of an untold number of outdoor stimuli—the smell of pine needles, the feel of wind over their skin—contributed to their understanding of themselves and where they found themselves in this world. A question that, for kids from hard places, is often hard to answer.

I don’t know which mattered more: the tree or the swing. Together they were more than the sum of their physical or metaphysical parts. They were transcendent. They were sacramental. A location of grace undeserved and unexpected. A portal to some other plane of reality. A place of grounded-ness amidst all the changes and chances of this life—so much so that even six years after they lived with us, our foster girls were asking about that swing in that tree.

Are these things gone because we’ve moved? Are we able to find what they offered somewhere else? Peter, Susan, Edmond, and Lucy never got back to Narnia through the wardrobe again.

But they did get back.

As you can tell, I don’t do well with change. “He’s emotionally unstable,” you might be saying to yourself. “He’s over-thinking this. Everybody moves.” And to that I would say… Yeah, so?

But what if my emotionally overwrought response to a cross-town move is the healthy, normal response? What if you, in your don’t-be-so-melodramatic dismissiveness, are the one who needs therapy (or a refined sensory diet)?

Some of the neighbors in our previous neighborhood have lived there since the subdivision was built in 1970s. They’ve lived in the same place for 50-some years. That is unfathomable. Yet in this rootless world, it’s very appealing. To swing under the same tree for 50 years would do something to a person.

A few years ago we called in a tree service to remove a dying cottonwood in our front yard. The crew leader told us that the roots of a tree mirror the scope and breadth of its canopy. What we see above us, what brings delight to our senses, is supported by an unseen network of fibers that extends as far as the above-ground expanse.

Sometimes I think that moving is like tree removal. In one way it is. But it’s also like transplanting a tree—something far more complex and delicate. Transplanting a tree, or any plant, will inevitably result in some of the roots getting left behind. When the tree is planted again, it takes time for the roots to actually spread, because they’re recovering from the trauma. (Pro-tip: that’s why you should buy smaller trees from local nurseries instead of larger ones from the big-box brands. The smaller trees have faster root development and more consistent growth.)

We still have the yellow platform swing, and it hangs from the ash tree in our new front yard. The branch it hangs from is closer to the trunk and has a lot of give to it. So Linds and I have some misgivings about its current placement. Our kids still enjoy it, and the neighbor girls across the street love it. There’s a part of me that feels as if it’s a different swing. It doesn’t feel as serene or unique or transportable without a towering ponderosa pine tree above it. I suppose that as my family establishes its existential root ball in our new home (which we love, truly, and we are thrilled to be there), we’ll have to find new things that ground us and shape us and calibrate our senses and form memories that linger long after all else is forgotten.

But something happened the other day that made me temper my assumptions. A cousin of mine and his family spent the day with us. They have a severely autistic son. He son noticed the platform swing and curled up in it. His mom started to push him. It was mid-morning, and the August heat was lessened by the shade of the ash tree.

“He would do this all day,” she said.

Maybe there is some magic left in the wardrobe after all.