This summer, we bought a porch swing. Of all the trips you're planning this summer, I highly recommend this one. It can take you places you might not have visited in a while. (You travel figuratively, of course, which saves loads of cash and time.)

If a porch swing was featured anywhere in your past, just a few lazy back-and-forth motions can elicit memories that haven't synapsed in decades, catapulting you there.

My grandmother's porch had a swing, and though 30 or so years have passed, the time and place instantly surround me. The smallness of being 8 or 9 years old, the length of my hair on my shoulders, the certainty of being on OK terms with life and who I was -- that person still deep within that, despite the metamorphoses of time and age and all it's brought (and wrought), I still am.

They say true memories are those you can remember as if you're looking out through your eyes at them.

Another memory pops up as I swing -- me as a toddler with my mother on grandmother's swing. That may not really be my memory at all, however. It may be my mother's, as told to me again and again when she swings with her grandchildren.

Yet I can picture the details she recounts as if I'm peering through a telescope. Nestled under her arm, fresh from my bath on a summer evening, feet bare, in the youth of my parents' marriage, before they could afford their own house, before the children had grown, with countless memories already behind them of which I had not yet been born to, but would also come to remember as if I had.

And then there's the present, which a swing can sink you into if you're very careful to let it.

We have our swing hooked under the back deck, looking out across the pool. Sometimes in the evenings I'll sit and watch my boys submerge and resurface, again and again. They float beside or apart from one another, breath humming from snorkel tubes like the late summer crickets that are soon to come.

The boys are imprinting memories that will pop to mind when they are grown and I am old, swinging on the porch.

First Published: July 20, 2007, 3:00 a.m.