T is for...

T is for...tree houses

I think we moved from the house I was born in to the house I grew up in when I was about 6 or 7. Well, I wasn't actually born in the house but it was the house my parents lived in when I was born in the hospital like all good modern babies were.

We moved from a post-war housing neighborhood to a custom built home on one acre in a neighborhood carved out of a pine forest across Buffalo Bayou from the heavily wooded and mostly undeveloped (then) forest of Memorial Park. We didn't actually live on the bayou but it was a short walk down the street and through the yard of a house that did back onto the bayou.

A couple of years after we moved, my father built us kids a tree house. He selected three large pines on the wooded side of our acre so that our tree house was triangular in shape and built maybe 10' off the ground, perhaps 6' x 10' on two of the three sides. The only picture I have of it is the one in my head so I'm guessing at any and all dimensions. It had a board ladder nailed to the trunk of one of the supporting pines, low walls probably 3' high and was roofed and sided with cedar shakes.

Well, probably he built the tree house for my brother, but I spent many an hour up there.

Like all kids in all neighborhoods we would, every so often, divide up into factions and war on each other. Every year after christmas, we would make and raid each other's christmas tree forts but what I really remember were the pine cone wars. Not for the meek were they. They would always start in someone's yard, pine cones were plentiful and hurt like the devil if one of the missiles hit their mark, but once we retreated to the tree house, we were unbeatable. We had not only the advantage of high ground but we also kept a stockpile of the closed hard prickly pine cones up there.

Eventually, as we all grew older, the tree house was abandoned and after we were all grown, my parents sold the house. A high rise stands now where our house and the tree house once stood. The woods and fields we played in are also gone.

I've never lost my love of tree houses, gained though watching many a Tarzan movie, and I sometimes wish we had moved out to the country sooner. Any one of the three large pecans in the big back yard or even the tallow in the little back yard would hold a small tree house. I fear the grandkids are already too old though for one to hold much mystery for them.

While the one we had as kids was quite simple, I could easily live in one of these.

If you would like to catch up on the rest of my alphabet posts, click on the link on my side bar. It's up there near the top under 'stuff about me'.