End Note: A Harding swing and a ring

I like to tell people I was a Harding baby. I am the daughter of two 1988 alumni, and I grew up hearing about and seeing the Harding campus. I have cousins, aunts and uncles who all attended Harding at one time or another. I loved Spring Sing before I even knew what the word “choreography” meant. There is even a picture of me at 12 years old on a Harding swing on the front lawn with my sisters.

As a result, I had it all planned out. I, too, would go to Harding. I would go to chapel, join my mom’s social club, perform my heart out on the Benson stage during Spring Sing, fall in love with a Harding boy, and raise more Harding babies.?However, God has a funny way of completely changing anything I try to plan and giving me something better. My sophomore year of high school, I transferred to a small, private Christian school in Middle Tennessee. It was here that I would meet my first boyfriend, Richard. I was definitely not looking to meet my future spouse at 16, but Richard quickly became a wonderful Christian friend and encourager. There was only one problem: Richard was a Freed-Hardeman baby.

We spent sophomore, junior and senior years of high school going to homecoming football games, helping each other with physics projects, and worship- ping at youth group events.?As graduation drew closer, we knew there was a tough choice to make. We both loved our separate schools, and neither of us wanted to give up the college experience we had always wanted.

We broke up for most of our first semester of college. Long distance was hard work that we just were not sure we were ready for. However, it did not take long for us both to realize that life just was not as much fun without the other person. We decided to give the long distance thing a shot.

We spent the rest of our college days driving many miles,?learning two campuses, coordinating Memphis, Tennessee,?visits and cherishing moments?where we just got to do home-?work together. Thankfully, we both were still able to join social clubs, participate in our universities’ spring shows, and be fully immersed in our own college experiences.

We began to find our place in each other’s worlds and clung to the similarities in our college experiences to stay connected. It was on one sweet November day that my Richard made one of those similarities the center of the beginning of our life together.

Most in the Harding community have heard the phrase “three swings and a ring,” which implies that if you swing with the same person on three different iconic Harding swings, you are destined to be married. With our long- distance relationship, we never really had the time or opportunity for our “three swings and a ring,” but Richard knew how much I love Harding and its traditions.

After five years of dating, I woke up Nov. 22, 2014, to a note on my front door from Richard telling me that today was the day.?I was being proposed to, and I was going to have my own “three swings and a ring.” The rest of the day, I was driven by my sister and two best friends to three different important locations from our relation- ship. At each place, there was a note and my own swing waiting for me that Richard had built himself. At the third stop, he was waiting for me and pro- posed right in front of our own swing.

The Harding swings mean more now to me than they ever have and have become a symbol?for Richard and my relationship. A swing is incorporated into all of our wedding designs. We took engagement pictures in the swing he built, and it will also make an appearance at our wedding. The Harding swings were some- thing we could connect with when it was so easy to feel disconnected. While I may not have fallen in love with a Harding boy to raise more Harding babies with, I cannot wait to sit with my Christian man and our Christian babies on our own Harding swing.

-Toria Parrett ('15)