Take a closer look.

I saw the most beautiful thing while driving home this morning. On the street I usually take into our neighborhood, there is a house whose yard I generally find to be cluttered with the oddest arrangement of things. Tiki gods and a liberty bell. A bed of flowers made with a toddler bed that looks oddly like...maybe...a grave? I don't know. I've just always noticed it was a little...different. Today as I drove by, I noticed for the very first time that they have a big, old fashioned swing hanging from the giant oak tree in their yard. It's the old fashioned kind - a rope thrown over a branch and knotted on either end of a plank of wood. I noticed it because there was a grown man swinging in that swing with the most beautiful, child-like abandon. It's a great morning for it. It's cool and sunny. It looked like SO MUCH FUN the way he just swung back and forth - big, high swings. It took a minute for me to think - hey - that's kind of odd - some big dude swinging on a tree swing. And then I looked a little closer. There has been a sign at about that point on the drive for the year and a half we've lived here. I've noticed it, but never really paid that much attention. The sign says 'Caution Handicapped Child'. I'm thinking, the sign is probably many years old, and the gentleman I saw swinging in that tree is that very 'child'. I think there's a tendency to think - oh, that's so sad - he's 'intellectually disabled'. (Why yes, I DID just google what the politically correct term these days is.) But this guy...I don't know what he's like day-to-day. I don't know what he understands or how he perceives the world. All I know about him is this....he likes to swing really, really high. Somebody loves him enough to make him a tree swing to play in, and to have random other interesting objects for him in their yard, even if it makes the rest of the snooty neighbors annoyed with them. He is happy. He plays with abandon. Kind of makes me think I'm the one with the disability, you know?