Our kitchen stool and the ladder-chair left the kitchen and walked out to the front yard Saturday. I didn’t see them leave, but I did see them under the low branches of the pecan tree. Snugged tightly against the tree, the chair and stool served our guests with the one skill they could provide: a boost.
Our visiting guests definitely needed a boost, not just to sit high enough at the table or the counter, but a boost to reach the branches they could almost touch, as they stood on the ground, if they stretched up high enough. I didn’t move too close to investigate. The trio of youngsters appeared to have it under control. One of them, I never did see which, moved the bar stool to just the right position so they could climb onto the stool and pull themselves into a fork of the tree branches.
Nor did I see them inside the house for the next couple of hours. I wandered out long enough to take a picture of them in the tree, but ignored the items strewn under the tree: the books, the markers and crayons, the paper they managed to pound into the tree.
With the stool that wandered out of our house, the eight-, five- and three-year-old grandchildren found an afternoon of entertainment and imagination under the spreading pecan tree. It is the only tree with branches low enough for them to reach right now.
They took turns sitting in the tree through the afternoon. Even the three-year-old conquered the tree at my house. As I worked around the house, carrying items out to the garage, I always took a moment to look down the driveway to check on them. With no electricity, no television, no fancy set of toys, that one corner of our yard provided an afternoon of entertainment. All they needed was the tree, a boost and time to sort out all by themselves whose turn it was to sit in the tree.
It was a big deal for the three-year-old to finally try her hand at climbing into a tree. She did it without a camera to record that first moment. All by herself she became part of her siblings’ tree climbing gang. At their own house, the two oldest have long ago expanded the sturdy swing set to include the nearby, overhanging, jungle gym of apple tree branches. They spend time perching on the branches, rulers of their world.
Having seen their interest, we may need to consider adding a permanent ladder to one of our trees with a bit higher branches – as my father and brothers did to the maple tree in the front yard of the farm where I lived as a child.
I spent many summer afternoons under the spreading maple tree enjoying the quiet it afforded me to venture into the land of Let’s Pretend. My dad threw a rope over the largest branch, pulled it down and attached a tire to it for a swing. In the quiet under the tree, I swung back and forth imagining I could be a circus performer.
In time, a wooden platform became a permanent fixture over the tree swing – securely attached to the tree’s strong lower branches. My brothers and boy cousins had dibs on the tree house (well, platform. It never did have any sides, not even a low one to remind us to stay away from the edge.) They held their “boys only pow-wows” on their lookout tower. When they were working in the fields, the girls found time to climb up the slabs of wood for an afternoon of reading under the canopy of leaves shading us from the summer sun.
I know the usual sign says “no girls allowed” but I think more emphatically the message under each tree claimed by a child is “no parents allowed.” Once my parents secured the tree swing and platform in place they stayed away, as I did Saturday with my grandkids. Sometimes a kid just needs some space to grow without intense adult supervision. I can’t think of a better place for the afternoon without adults than in the front lawn under the leafy branches of a tree.
(Joan Hershberger is a staff writer at the News-Times and author of “Twenty Gallons of Milk and Other Columns from the El Dorado News-Times.” Email her at joanh@everybody.org)