Gabe was climbing in one of our pine trees the other day and it reminded me of my childhood. I told him that I climbed trees as a boy and so did his father and uncles. His two girl cousins, Kasia and Kinsey are also lovers of the sport. So I decided to put these images on my blog and again blog the story of my favorite tree to climb as a youth. (See below)
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 and Nana did earlier than 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 did 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 two 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.
