With a tidy layer of snow chilling out our world today and this evening, I decided to think summer -- and what can be more summery than a swing?

The standard swing swing, the sort with a flat board as a seat, has been turned into a playground safety officer's prime project and thoroughly wimped out in the process. Fortunately, I've found that there are still a few old-fashioned swings being fashioned from tires. The example above I spotted on a back street near the old fairgrounds; that below was at the
Chino Valley alpaca farms I visited late last year.


But what to make of this object? When I grabbed a quick image in passing, I though it was some sort of tire swing. Then, on examining the photo this evenng, it turned into a possible sculpt. A deer or elk or maybe reindeer, huh? Something whispered in my ear to enlarge the putative art object -- and lo, it appears to have been sculpted from tires, possibly to make into a high-class, you guessed it, tire swing.

Me, I was never one for the tire swing, which I considered very much a guy thing. Unlike a board swing, the tire swing primarily wants to go round and round nor is it easy to control. I'm quite sure that Robert Louis Stevenson did not have a tire swing in mind
when he wrote his popular poem, but then he was writing somewhat before the automobile had been invented, wasn't he?