git down from there, boy!
one of our favorite movies over the past couple of years has been "the sandlot". we all love it. jackson's favorite part is when the sandlot team and the little league team are talking junk. we laugh as the two kids call each other pus-lickers and fart-sniffers. jackson used to ask us if we could watch just the part where "those boys say those awesome words." he is well on his way to being an all-star at getting in someone's ear. i guess that's cool; but just in case, don't ask charlotte what she thinks.
after seeing the movie so many times, jackson has decided he needs a treehouse. unless the treehouse is going to be made of nail polish and scrap-booking materials, it will be up to me to build it. so far it coming around really well. it's going pretty slow because i don't do this kind of thing very often , but it is looking really good. if it ever gets finished, i will post a picture.
i have built one treehouse before. growing up, paul was my best friend. we lived on the top of a hill, and he lived at the base. he was my age and he had a brother and a sister the same ages as my siblings. there was a highly defined path criss-crossing the hill as the six of us hiked up and down that hill for 10 years going back and forth between houses.
one day paul and i decided we needed to build a treehouse. who knows whose idea it was, but we didn't have a cool place to hang. we needed privacy, so it couldn't be built too close to either of our homes. i don't even remember where we found any wood, but we did acquire some somewhere along the way. all the wood scraps we had gathered were carted across the creek, over the fence, and down a path to a huge oak tree located on someone else's property. what better place for secrecy than somewhere you aren't meant to be in the first place? our building skills were seriously lacking. i know we pounded some nails into some 2x4's and secured some plywood up there somewhere; but i can't remember anything else happening that would have made the project look like it was built with a specific design in mind. there were no walls, and there obviously was no roof. it was ( pretty much) just a couple of platforms up in a tree that could be used as places for a couple of kids to perch. it seems like i remember putting some old carpet up there to make things more comfortable. if it sounds unimpressive, that's only because it was. at the time, you wouldn't have been able to convince us of any deficiency in its construction- it was just what we needed.
we hung out up there for most of the summer. i think we played cards, read books individually, and looked at illicit magazines all pre-adolescent boys miraculously happen upon. how we ended up having possession of soft-core porn is beyond my thinking, but there it was, nevertheless. we spent a great summer wearing a new path between the river and the treehouse.
and then one day we walked down the path to the treehouse to find that it had been utterly destroyed by several (well placed) shotgun blasts. our sanctuary had been reduced to the treehouse on the river kwai. being from two non-shotgun owning families; paul and i hauled butt out of there ,scared to death. we could just imagine some inbred yokel chasing after us to the sounds of "dueling banjos." no such thing happened, but we never again ventured back to the site of our previous architectural triumph. this is where i stood for over twenty years- until last week.
what is the big deal with treehouses, anyway. the ewoks were stupid and useless, and celeborn and galadriel were overrated. even so, they sure are fun. give me a call sometime and you can come hang in ours...pending jackson's approval, of course.
after seeing the movie so many times, jackson has decided he needs a treehouse. unless the treehouse is going to be made of nail polish and scrap-booking materials, it will be up to me to build it. so far it coming around really well. it's going pretty slow because i don't do this kind of thing very often , but it is looking really good. if it ever gets finished, i will post a picture.
i have built one treehouse before. growing up, paul was my best friend. we lived on the top of a hill, and he lived at the base. he was my age and he had a brother and a sister the same ages as my siblings. there was a highly defined path criss-crossing the hill as the six of us hiked up and down that hill for 10 years going back and forth between houses.
one day paul and i decided we needed to build a treehouse. who knows whose idea it was, but we didn't have a cool place to hang. we needed privacy, so it couldn't be built too close to either of our homes. i don't even remember where we found any wood, but we did acquire some somewhere along the way. all the wood scraps we had gathered were carted across the creek, over the fence, and down a path to a huge oak tree located on someone else's property. what better place for secrecy than somewhere you aren't meant to be in the first place? our building skills were seriously lacking. i know we pounded some nails into some 2x4's and secured some plywood up there somewhere; but i can't remember anything else happening that would have made the project look like it was built with a specific design in mind. there were no walls, and there obviously was no roof. it was ( pretty much) just a couple of platforms up in a tree that could be used as places for a couple of kids to perch. it seems like i remember putting some old carpet up there to make things more comfortable. if it sounds unimpressive, that's only because it was. at the time, you wouldn't have been able to convince us of any deficiency in its construction- it was just what we needed.
we hung out up there for most of the summer. i think we played cards, read books individually, and looked at illicit magazines all pre-adolescent boys miraculously happen upon. how we ended up having possession of soft-core porn is beyond my thinking, but there it was, nevertheless. we spent a great summer wearing a new path between the river and the treehouse.
and then one day we walked down the path to the treehouse to find that it had been utterly destroyed by several (well placed) shotgun blasts. our sanctuary had been reduced to the treehouse on the river kwai. being from two non-shotgun owning families; paul and i hauled butt out of there ,scared to death. we could just imagine some inbred yokel chasing after us to the sounds of "dueling banjos." no such thing happened, but we never again ventured back to the site of our previous architectural triumph. this is where i stood for over twenty years- until last week.
what is the big deal with treehouses, anyway. the ewoks were stupid and useless, and celeborn and galadriel were overrated. even so, they sure are fun. give me a call sometime and you can come hang in ours...pending jackson's approval, of course.
posted by cm at 11/19/2005
<< Home