Trees

When I was a kid, we had a maple tree in our backyard that was perfect for climbing.  I still remember my route up, which was always the same…swing myself up from the bottom branch (which was a slight stretch to reach), then up about 4 more good thick branches until I got to my perch spot.  I climbed up there a lot:  during hide and seek, to eat a Kool Pop unbothered by my bratty brother Dave,  just to sit and think because of course there was not much to do all summer and sometimes I had to just hang out by myself.  I tried to show my kids my tree a few years ago, with plans of even hoisting myself up and finding my route, but I found that even though I had grown, so had the tree.  My bottom branch was waaay too high for me.

So now I’m going to Pull a Taradactyl and show you some theme pictures.  Can you guess the theme?

That’s me up there, however I’m in the silver maple in our yard, which was also good for climbing, but was a lot more open foliage-wise, so it wasn’t as great a place to climb and hide out.  Look at the lower branch sticking out on the left side of the picture…the next two pictures involve that branch.

The next photo shows my bratty brother Dave and me sitting on that lowest branch.

A photographer came out to our house and did a long, torturous photo shoot.  As you can see, even though I had been instructed to look up, I snuck a look back, just as the photographer snapped this picture.  I remember how disappointed mom was when she saw the proof.  She really laid it on thick that I had spoiled the photo, and I felt pretty badly about that, because my bratty brother Dave had spent most of this photo shoot crying (probably because he was dressed in a 3 piece denim leisure suit in July), and had finally started cooperating. 

I think that I have now experienced my mother’s frustration firsthand…many times over (see Christmas card fail posts).

Above is a picture of Maddie and Ben on the very same tree branch.  My mom thought it would be cute to get a photo of them together there, and you can see they cooperated about as well and my bratty brother Dave and I had.  I remember being worried that they would fall out of the tree (they are only 3 and 4 here), so my tense manner probably didn’t help.

The next few pictures take place at my in-laws’ house.  They have several good climbing trees!

You can see in the last two photos, that the kids (and that is cousin Nick with Ben in the photo on the left) have graduated from the smaller apple trees to climbing the larger maple tree in their yard.  And I have become a tense mother yet again.

Recently, the boys realized that two of the trees in our yard have finally become climbable.  Ben has climbed particularly high into our ornamental pear tree, scaring the bejeebers out of me.

Can you see Ben?

He doesn’t look that high, but trust me…he is.

Look, Jack even likes to climb broken trees!

Jack has been sitting with me, bugging me while I wrote this blogpost.  I asked him for a good wrap-up sentence for this post, and here are his offerings:

“Trees, trees, trees, trees, trees.”

“Trees prevent air.”

“I mean, trees give air.”

“Trees are nice.”

And there you have it.