21 Balançoires

I'm excited.  No, I'm ecstatic.  

I'm in Montreal this summer, where another of my most favourite public art pieces is out again.  
21 Balançoires (<-totally click on that), by Montreal-based design house Daily tous les jours, is an interactive musical installation that plays best when people join to play on it together.  It's a sensorial wonder, evoking memories, connections, and tenderness where words don't reach - oh, it also makes music.

I missed it last time I was in la belle ville, but it's annual spring appearance is being carried over into the summer this year I hear (<- click to listen to the April 29 show at 8:29 minute mark).

This is place-making at its most breathtaking.  I can't wait.

I'm a life-long swinger*.  I swing when I'm happy.  I swing when I'm sad.  In the summer, I swing almost every day, and sometimes late on a warm night too.  I never tire of it, and am constantly surprised at how much joy I experience gliding back and forth through the air, flying and diving at the same time.

Can't wait to share this.  À bientôt les 21 balançoires!                          Here's a little snippet ... 

* I mourn the loss of some of the older words -  swinging, thongs, kangaroo jacket, for example - now needing to explain myself when I use them.  I'm very attached to these words, or perhaps it's to the era when they were actively used, so innocently it now seems.  

Maybe it's that loss of innocence, that gentler time, that I yearn for.  When I ran around with thongs on my feet, sometimes stubbing my toe because the flimsy rubber sole folded under itself;  the kangaroo jacket, that handy muff (another word) pocket in front where anything shoved in there could be readily accessed by either side, and a hood for warmth at night by the fire;  and my beloved swinging, an activity whose word for it conveys the unfettered freedom and fun of this spectacular experience, now plunged into the murky underworld of fringier experiences that have laid claim to that once perfect word.