An Automatic Swing Thing

So on Facebook the other day I posted that I needed a "thing" to automatically make my patio swing, swing without me using my foot to make it move. You need to know that I am a "sprawler". I seem to have had this condition since I became a mom. You see when I had a minute when the kids were taking a nap I  zoomed around the house and did everything that should  had to be done as quickly as possible before they woke up. That means that the dusting does not always get done. It also means that the only thing that really matters is that supper is started and well on its way to being done before the 6 o'clock whistle blows. That whistle in the little town that we lived in alerted housewives that their husbands would soon be home from work. You have to know that that was in the late sixties. You also need to understand that I was twenty-five or so. I had energy.
We were broke. I wanted to stay home with my two very young children, so I started my own day care. I ended up with a lot of children. At one time my sister-in-law helped me because I had so many children to care for.
I really needed a place to sprawl. There was only "community" space; the davenport. If my daughter is reading this, she will shake her head when she reads the word, davenport. That's what couches were called then, young people.

Our house that used to be white.
Picture taken in 2017

Anyway I may have mentioned a time or two, or possibly nagged that I needed a place that I could call my own and just relax at the end of the day. My husband did the unthinkable. He screened in  part of our wraparound porch on one side. I had my sprawl room. For about twenty-five seconds! My little two year old thought that riding his trike was great fun there. My daughter seemed to understand,  she liked to accompany me out there, but she was quiet and played/read her books. I never got a swing. However, I got a 15' Coke machine.
Why would a man spend ten dollars on an old Coke machine? I'll tell you why, to raise minnows in. Ten dollars to me in those days was like a thousand would be to me now. I was furious!!
Wally explained to me that he and his brothers were going to seine

Seining experts, not the brothers.

the river and get minnows and sell them for extra spending money. Errr. So it happened, my sprawl space was now a minnow hatchery for bait. The brothers soon found out why they got the Coke machine so cheap. The wiring was bad and soon electrocuted all of the minnows they had so proudly seined.  End of story,but not end of minnow raising attempts.
Their next attempt at raising minnows was to raise them in an old wringer washing machine. Of course, they had no aerator so they assumed in their "beer drinking state" that turning on the machine so it would agitate would give the tiny little victims the oxygen they needed. That agitator just beat the minnows to death. The end of raising minnows, however, like I said on Facebook I never ever had such a tomato crop in my life. I dug a hole, added dead minnows, place a tomato plant in the hole. That's how its done!!
So anyway getting back to my sprawling situation, my sister-in-law that lives in Tennessee commented "you could put a motor on your swing, but it would probably go into high gear and throw you off the deck." That's all it took for me to remember all the good times in that great big old house. All the good times with Wally's family, and nowhere to sprawl. So who cares?