Howdy Summer to you my friends!

 

IS THERE ANYONE OUT THERE who has noticed it’s almost summertime? When there is so much upheaval in the world it’s hard to keep up with the little ol’ things like summertime. Is summer still the season of road trips? A friend of mine drives a truck with a 37 gallon tank. Yikes. 

 

On a lighter note, we’re alive! And enjoying later sunsets and slowly fading evenings till twilight. If it’s not a horribly hot summer, these long days feel like the way life ought to be. Like when you were a kid and one summer day could last a week. Remember that? You hop up the first day after school is out and grab your sneakers and yesterday’s shorts and maybe a fresh tee-shirt and you head over to Bobby’s ‘cause y’all are building a new tree house! I can’t remember anything as great as building a tree house and when you’d just get one fairly level board secured, you’d climb up there and dangle your little legs and say things like “Man, this is livin’ ain’t it?” Your pal of course would agree. “Sure is! Do you know where some more boards might be? I got a can o’ nails already.” You knew that can of nails was hard won, in that they had mostly been found in alleys or walking around houses, where you would always find rusty nails bent and discarded. Why would anyone leave a perfectly good bent nail on the ground? The art of bending ‘em back semi-straight was a talent every kid I knew had mastered.

 

We’d hop out of the tree onto the garage, then where the tall fence butted up against it, we’d wiggle down till our toes could touch the upper rail and then climb on down by stepping on the gas meter and then at last, the dusty ground. Monkeys were our heroes. And Tarzan too, I guess. 

 

Bobby would head off one way down the alley and me the other. We had a formula. Unless we found a motherlode of lumber right away, we would each go two blocks in the alley, then move over one block west and come back — where we would meet and discuss what we’d seen that might need to be drug back and taken apart to be made into our tree house. If we’d found a board or two, those we carried to show each other. Like braves in a hunting party, showing how many rabbits and skunks we’d got.

 

I guess the best thing any of us ever found was the summer I found a dog house discarded upside down in the alley. What!? Somebody is throwing this dog house away? Right there next to the garbage can was a square box, homemade for sure. Four wooden sides and a flat wooden top which made it almost a full cube. But on one of the sides a square door had been sawed. Well, I seen it right away as practically a complete, ready-to-go doghouse. I ran all the way up the alley to find Bobby. “You ain’t gonna believe what I found, man! Somebody built our tree house already and just left it by their trash can. We gotta go get it quick or some other kid’s gonna turn it into a big square go cart!” 

 

We hurried back, out of breath when we got there. Yay! It was still there. Bobby reached down and worked his fingers under one side and I the other. We couldn’t see each other as we carried it and we bumped a lotta stuff in that alley, but we finally got it back to Bobby’s house and dropped it in the alley to marvel at our practically already built tree house. 

 

“Okay, we gotta make a plan for how we’re gonna get it up there,” I wheezed. I wish somebody had been up on the garage taking a picture of us gazing up with shiny eyes and sweat on our faces and dust on our tee-shirts. Anything that you pick off the ground in Texas is gonna leave its dust on you. We finally decided that first, we needed another parallel board nailed up in the tree. Bobby said he’d seen a board over the winter at Mr. Simpson’s house behind the greenhouse. We went and tiptoed up to look over the fence and seen that it was a board going to waste unless we could get it outta there and nailed up in our tree. We wanted to save that board! Bobby climbed over and grabbed one end, worked it out of a mess of morning glory vines and handed one end to me at the top of the fence. We really liked Mr. Simpson but we thought it would be best that we not mention we were doing him this favor and getting rid of an old board damp in the weeds. Kids didn’t have gloves back then except for winter mittens, so we had to be careful for splinters. Splinters were as much a part of boyhood as band aids were. 

 

In the alley next to the garage we worked one end up into the tree and I climbed up and started pulling it up so we could nail it. We were very proud of our good sense in measuring the width of that dog house so we would have support in the right place. The way we measured was to set it on its side so I could stand next to it and then Bobby took a stick out of the ground and smudged a line across my shoulder. “Measure once with a stick” has been a helpful motto my whole life. It was harder than we planned for me to lie down up there and apply our precise measuring to a branch.

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Well, we went through a lot of tries in getting that heavy dog house up in that tree. The last thing we wanted to do was to take it apart and have to rebuild it up there. What a waste of an already nearly complete tree house! But the awkward positions we got ourselves into on that fence and garage and up in the boughs of that tree would have been a lesson in geometry or maybe some kind o’ building science. All I know is we kept trying. Finally, we thought to use Mr. Simpson’s garden hose for a rope. We looped it around that dog house several times, then tied it, then I started out on the ground lifting while Bobby pulled the hose from up in the tree. When we got it as high as I could reach, I held it from underneath like that Atlas fella used to hold the world — until I was shaky as heck. 

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“Tie it off, Bobby! Hurry! I’m ‘bout to collapse, man!” When Bobby said, “Got it!” And I could let go, I had to walk around bending different ways to see if my body was messed up as bad as it felt. But then I climbed up there and the two of us pulled that hose like experienced sailors raising the mast of a ship. We would not have let any kids stand under us, both our daddys had explained so many times about kids accidentally maiming each other by recklessness. We didn’t know maiming was way more serious than it sounded, but we knew you could sure get in trouble for it. 

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When we had that dog house finally upright and resting on those two boards which turned out to be not as parallel as we’d thought, the level of achievement seemed like something we’d never ever surpass. Out of breath, scratched up, splintered up, bruised a little on my ribs and Bobby’s nose, we were on top of the world in the old Chinese Elm Tree. We must have just sat there for an hour marveling at how good life is. Only a week before we’d still been in school. Now in the first week of June we had already created our favorite place for the summer. Bobby had unbent enough nails for us to get the dog house anchored to the boards. So we stood inside it. The cutout of a doggy door made a wonderful step-over entry for us. We could even sit down and there was maybe room for two more kids. Standing up, we could probably get six kids in there if we ever wanted. But neither of us really wanted a bunch of kids up there with us. We’d worked hard to make our secret getaway in the magical alley between Louisiana and Alabama streets.