Friday, February 23, 2007

The day they tore down my treehouse

When I was very young my parents had a small home on the corner lot right next to the local school. Every day was met with excitement to see what activities would unfold next door in and around the schoolyard. This proved to be a constant source of new and interesting events brought about by the activities around having all twelve grades in a single location right next door.

One of my fondest memories of that time was of having a small tree-house in a china berry tree in our yard right beside the end of the schoolhouse. I could climb up in the tree and perch on the flat platform suspended about 10 feet above the ground and survey the whole world. From that lofty place I could look toward the row of windows in the end of the school building and see a room full of fourth graders learning about life and preparing for their move to the next grade at the end of the year.

Occasionally the teacher and students would spy me sitting in the tree-house and would wave for me to come over to the window for a visit. I would climb down the tree and trot over to the window where they would often talk for a few minutes and sometimes help me climb up onto the window ledge and down into the classroom for a short visit. This was always an exciting event and there would always be conversation about what the students were doing on that day and what was going on around school.

I will never forget learning one spring that the county school board has made my parents an offer on our home and then finding out that my parents had agreed to sell the house to the county. It seemed that the school needed a new cafeteria and the plan called for adding it on the end of the building where our home was. Unfortunately this meant we would have to move in order to allow the school addition to be constructed.

During the early part of the summer on a bright and sunny day I remember a small group of construction workers marching over to our yard and hooking a chain to the tree my treehouse was perched in, attaching the other end of the chain to a tractor and then ripping the tree down along with my treasured "happy place". In a short while the entire tree and platform were a hundred feet or so behind the schoolhouse where the buses usually parked and thrown onto a pile of rubble. They tossed a little kerosene onto the platform and other debris and flipped a match into the pile. In the twinkling of an eye the pile was blazing right up to the clouds and my tree-house was disappearing in a stream of gray smoke. In a few hours the whole pile was reduced to a little mound of ashes with a few nails, metal fasteners and miscellaneous unidentifiable items left behind when the fire burned out. The tree-house was gone forever and soon the home by the schoolhouse was to be home no more.

That summer my parents began the process of having a small home build a few blocks away and moving to the new address. A short time after that the old house by the school was lifted onto a house mover's truck and moved a block down the street from the school, then later restored for a new resident. To this day the old house is still there and has been remodeled as is often done with older homes in the area.

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