May 3, 2010

Did you have a treehouse?

No, but I had plenty of trees to climb and play in as we had an apple orchard as part of our yard.

Here is a story about one of those trees.

Climbing the Green Ash tree in the yard.

Boys just love to climb and trees were made just for boys who love to climb no matter how dangerous that might be to the boy. Well we had many trees around our yard because mom liked trees or Nana did earlier that that. There were two trees though that were my favorite ones, a green ash tree and a Red Delicious apple tree. The apple tree because I could climb up it’s trunk and into the top branches when they were loaded with apples and then slide down the top of the branches to the ground, a round trip sort of thing. I di that countless times and maybe that was why it seemed to have grown so old when I returned from my mission. The green ash tree however was a different sort of challenge. It had a trunk that went up for several feet before the first branch so I had to shinny up that distance before being able to climb onto the branch and rest. It seemed like that branch was 100 feet off the ground because my first tow or three years attempting the climb always ended in failures due to the distance of that first limb. I did finally conquer the methods and talents and skills necessary and had many successful climbs. I returned a few years ago with these memories in my mind and I was shocked at how low that first branch was to the ground, well it must have dropped twenty feet through the years after I had stopped climbing, or else my perspective had changed as I grew taller. You can probably guess which was the real thing.