Twelve years ago, in 1996, my friends Gerd Krahn, Rudy Cram and I assembled my daughter's wooden swing set. Actually, Gerd and Rudy did most of the assembling because they both worked at Goodrich Aerospace in Vergennes, which meant they were far more competent than I was when it came to understanding the complex aerodynamics and lengthy assembly instructions of a swing set. Also, they were both better than I was at banging nails straight into wood. And that baby used a lot of nails. In addition to swings, it had a slide, a climbing net, and an elevated platform.

The swing set was used by my daughter and her friends in the manner the designers intended for the next five years. Then, beginning around 2001, it served for a while as an impromptu movie set. In that period, my daughter and her pals seemed only to be on the swing set when they were dressed up in dancewear or ball gowns -- purchased for a buck or two each at the annual Lincoln clothing rummage sale -- and using the camcorder to film their activities. Finally, beginning around 2005, it was used largely by our cats as a high perch from which they could lust after birds, which would dart past them like the biplanes that tormented King Kong atop the Empire State Building.

And so this spring we said goodbye to the swing set. The swings and the slide era at our house officially came to an end, and my daughter, 14, passed another marker in her transformation from child to adult. The verdict to part with the swing set was reached quickly, and like many important decisions in my life was made in consultation with the aforementioned Rudy Cram.

Rudy has a tractor and I don't, so Rudy cuts my lawn. Rudy, for those of you who actually have a life and haven't been reading this column Sunday mornings since 1992, is also my next-door neighbor. And when we were surveying my yard at the start of the mowing season, he confessed that the presence of the swing set meant it would cost an extra $4 every time he mowed. Given that he would probably cut the grass 19 or 20 times, this meant that a swing set that is used entirely by my cats was going to cost me $80.

Now, here is how things work when the stars are perfectly aligned. Among Rudy's and my other neighbors are Ethan and Katina Ready. And so I said to Rudy, "I understand. But I was sort of hoping to hang onto the swing set until Ethan and Katina have a baby, and then just walking the swing set over to their yard. It's in pretty good shape."

And Rudy replied, "You haven't heard? Katina's expecting a baby this fall!"

Then, right on cue, at that precise moment Ethan emerged from his house and wandered into his backyard. I nearly brought him down with a flying tackle.

The rest, as they say, is history. It took six strong men to carry the swing set from my yard to the Readys'. And the stars were in such an ideal arrangement that I wasn't even one of those six men. I happened to be on, yes, a book tour. When I returned, the swing set was gone, and by Halloween, I will be $80 richer.

I should note that my daughter had no objection to losing the swing set. I did ask her if she wanted it, and it was as if I had asked if she wanted to spend the summer folding laundry for fun.

The only downside to bidding farewell to the swing set? My cats are sulking.

And, yes, in one more way my daughter's childhood exists only in memory -- and in those videos she made years ago.

(This column originally appeared in the Burlington Free Press on July 13, 2008.)

I was in rural Italy earlier this month, in a tiny village in Tuscany. Rural Italy is a lot like rural Vermont, except the women wear better shoes and everyone inhales olive oil the way we go through maple syrup. (Note to self: Do not try putting olive oil on pancakes.) Also, they speak English with less of an accent.

In any case, one of my Italian guidebooks listed "10 things to do with children." Though my hairline shows clearly that I haven't been even a teenager in well over a quarter century, I still have the emotional maturity of an 8-year-old. To wit: I still find my cats' hairballs funny. And so I perused the suggestions and saw that one was the San Gimignano Museum of Torture.

San Gimignano is a spectacularly beautiful medieval village built on a hill, which pretty much describes 7,000 other villages in Tuscany. If you look at a map of Tuscany, you'll see that every other village is Montesomething. If I had wanted, I could have taken a day and biked in a circle from Montisi to Montefollonico to Montepulciano to Montalcino and then back to Montisi.

The difference between San Gimignano and most villages is that it has seven massive medieval towers looming over the town, and more tourists per cobblestone than the Ben & Jerry's factory in Waterbury. Imagine Stowe at the peak of the foliage season, and then squeeze in a few thousand additional tourists, five separate parking lots and two dozen gift shops that sell nothing but maple syrup and snow globes of Mount Mansfield.

And, of course, add that torture museum. While my wife and daughter had the common sense to eat gelato and relax by a fountain in the midst of those medieval skyscrapers, I paid my seven euros and went in.

The museum is a collection of antiquarian torture devices, most of which involve wrought iron, ropes or very sharp points. Its ostensible message, if it has one, is that once humans had little regard for human life and were capable of inflicting frightening pain on one another in the name of religion or country or mere self-righteousness. There are the basics, of course, such as the rack and the iron maiden and a functioning guillotine -- which was actually supposed to end torture by killing the victim instantly. There is a dungeon. And there are displays of devices that only a real psychopath could have come up with, a disproportionate number of which seemed to involve impaling people. Everything is explained in five languages, and the diagrams can only be called grisly. I grew up on old Vincent Price movies, but I was getting nauseated and decided to leave.

I was just wondering what sort of lunatic this travel writer must have been to suggest this museum for children, when I came across a group of six Americans: Three teenagers and three adults. They were staring at an exhibit I hadn't noticed. It was a form of water torture, and the diagram explaining the process looked inexplicably familiar. Then I remembered: I had seen an illustration a little like this in 2007, in an article examining whether American interrogators were using torture in the present.

Teenagers, I believe, have pretty sound moral compasses. For every teen who thought it made sense (for example) to vandalize the Robert Frost cabin in Ripton, there were many more who were appalled. And so I wasn't surprised when one of the teens, a boy, turned to his mother or his aunt and observed, "Man. TiVo and torture. I wonder if that's going to be the U.S. legacy in a hundred years."

He was a tad unnerved, as was the rest of the group, and together we all filed out of the museum. Here, it seemed, was yet another parallel between the United States and Italy -- though, unfortunately, it might have been medieval Europe and modern America.

(This column originally appeared in the Burlington Free Press on July 20, 2008.)

The other day my wife wondered aloud what barn swallows did before there were barns. This is, of course, up there with such other meaning-of-life questions as, "What did people call Captain Hook before he lost his hand?" and "If people can have dog breath, can dogs have people breath? And what, precisely, is people breath anyway?"

She was wondering about barn swallows because this year a mom and pop pair of swallows -- my wife christened them Lil and Phil -- nested on a wooden crossbeam in our barn that offered my family both a perfect glimpse of the meticulousness with which they had built the cup-shaped nest, and then the mother's care and feeding of her four baby birds before they learned to fly. It was completely remarkable. It also meant that we had to treat our three cats as if they were swallow serial killers and put them under house arrest.

Actually, that's an exaggeration. The June and July incarceration was pretty lax. We simply kept a close eye on the cats when they were outside and made sure there was nothing tall on the barn floor near the nest from which one of our cats might make a desperate cliff dive whenever an adult swallow flew to or from the eggs or, eventually, the chicks.

Over time, we seemed to reach some sort of interspecies detente with the birds. They seemed to realize that humans, unlike the cats, meant them no harm and so they would remain in the nest when we approached it to check in on them. During a freakish windstorm -- a near tornado -- in late June, my wife and I watched the adults shivering in fear as winds whipped the barn. Not long after the eggs hatched, a friend of ours, Amanda Bull, got close enough to photograph the mother bird feeding the four young ones. In the image, the chicks' mouths are wide open, each one shaped like an upside down teardrop, the insides the yellow of wheat.

This past Monday morning, between 6 a.m. and 7:30, the four baby birds officially took flight. For a few hours, they perched, cheeping rather proudly it seemed to me, on the steep peak of the roof of our house. Their mother sat like a sentinel beside them. And now they are gone.

Without wanting to make too much of a rather obvious parallel, my wife and I can't help but compare ourselves with the birds' mom and pop. Our daughter has drawn nearer to 15 than to 14 -- earlier this summer I commented on the reality that she had outgrown her swing set -- and she is inching closer every day to fleeing the nest. Her friends are learning to drive. Just the other day, her pal Bridgette appeared in our driveway at the wheel of her mom and dad's minivan, her mother -- surprisingly serene -- in the passenger seat beside her. She has friends who will leave for colleges and conservatories in less than six weeks, and others who are starting to explore where they will hope to continue their education when they finish high school. She has peers who have jobs -- real jobs that pay real money.

Now that the swallows have left, our cats once more have the run of the yard. The first thing they did when we opened the front door to the house was dash like mad men and women for the barn. We're talking "The Amazing Race." My wife and I followed. There the two humans and three felines stared up at a wooden beam and a barren half-cup of straw and grass and mud.

For the first time, I think, I really understood what it meant to have an empty nest.

(This column originally appeared in the Burlington Free Press on July 26, 2008.)