Daddy put-up a rope swing in the backyard for my brother and I one summer. It wasn’t anything fancy, just a rope with a board for a seat that we straddled. It was the best toy I ever had. For many summers this rope-swing was a horse. A piece of an old jump rope attached to the board morphed into leather reins. The hard seat transformed into a saddle. The back and forth swinging motion was me galloping across the prairie. I would make up stores while I rode and spoke them out loud. I was always the hero. I always caught the bad guys. Sometimes I actually wore a red-felt dime store cowboy hat and when it flew off my head, I’d swoop down and pick it up; a trick-riding stunt.

I also had a stick-horse growing up. Actually it was an old rake that the head had broken…