The Tree House

Every kid wants a tree house. I dreamed of a luxurious tree house. I thought of where and how and what I could do in such a location.

Luckily, I had older brothers who also had this same dream.

An irrigation ditch ran through our pasture (now a pipeline). Along side this irrigation ditch was a couple of big old cottonwood trees. Sometime before I was aware, one of my brothers built a two story tree house. I loved that place.

They soon abandoned the tree house for more important things like motorcycles but I loved that place.

I would invite Scott over and we would load an old backpack with goodies and comic books and start our trek down to the fort. We had to get past the Blue Spruce trees, then the garden, through the barbed wire fence, jump across the ditch just at the right spot and then walk down the cow path.

One day we discovered a small green emerald. So we named the fort - Green Diamond.
We loved that place - except for the spiders. They ran us out most of the time but we would never admit it.

Around my grandma and grandpa's house they had a row of Poplar trees. One of those big old trees had a great tire swing. Up one side, my brother had nailed in some boards to make a ladder up to a spot where two huge limbs met. In there he built a partial platform.

To keep it private he eliminated a few rungs near the top. You had to possess a certain length of body to pass that span. I did not possess it. But I had a plan.

One day, with Tyler over, I converted him to my cause. We collected all the necessary items: hammer, nails, wood, hockey helmet, back catcher's chest protector and gloves. With the hammer, nails and wood he would replace the missing rungs. The other items were to protect him if he fell. Of course the helmet was so large it kept spinning around his head, and the chest protector went down to his shins and those gloves were old hockey gloves that were permanently formed in a grip posture for a hockey stick.

Nevertheless, I convinced him to don this protective garb and embark on this great quest. He turned back on rung four and he tested my conviction by challenging me to do it instead.

We played on the swing instead.