My 5 yr old son and I were walking through some wooded area at the park and there was an old treehouse. We talked about how high it was (he said it was as “high as the sky”; actually, it was maybe 20 feet in the trees) and how they had to use hammer and wood to build it. He then turned to me and asked “can we build one too? I can help you!”
I remember when I was growing up, building a treehouse was like a rite of passage. I grew up in your “typical” middle-class neighborhood where everyone knew each other and all the neighborhood kids played together until the sun went down. …and the neighborhood actually had trees around the homes!
I am now in what might be called a McMansion. Developers raze the land, build these oversized homes, and then landscape by planting bushes and a few small trees. There isn’t a tree in the neighborhood that would support a treehouse for a squirrel. But my son continued telling me about how we can use a ladder to climb and the type of wood we would need to build the treehouse. What’s a father to do?
For me, it was remembering the treehouse I had built so many years ago, and the fact that my parents still lived at the same house I grew up in and which was full of so many memories of playing fort in that treehouse. The treehouse from my youth is mostly rotted away but the tree is still standing and what better way to come full circle than to recondition it for use by another generation.
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