Treehouse: A Place Writing

We had a massive tree house in our backyard. Whenever I made a new friend, I just told them my house was the one with the castle tree house, and they’d be over that night. Dad built it by hand in 2001. I remember going to some scrap metal yard and getting two long metal playground slides to go along with our rope-net and wooden swing. Dad started sawing off pieces of the big oak tree growing next to our garden in the backyard until there was nothing but the trunk left, and he cut the top of the truck straight across to lay a 15 by 15 foot square wood floor on top. In the end, we had a castle. It was perfectly square and painted with grey bricks on the outside with four real-opening windows. Overtop, a white tarp was spread in a triangle like an old fashioned tent. We had two entrances: a ladder going up to a trapdoor entrance in the middle of the floor, and a front door that led out from the castle onto a balcony of think rope-net.

            From the net, we could climb left down the rest of the climbing net or go straight down the metal slides. The slides were attached to each other, the end of the first to the front of the second to reach the ground. We had to go slow down those slides because when the first one leveled off, the next one started to dip again, so we could fly right off the first slide and smack our tailbones on the bottom of the second if we weren’t careful. Mom warned us almost every single time we played on it not to hurt our butts. But dad was crazy with us. He would gather all the balls—basketballs, soccer balls, Wiffle balls, rubber bouncy-balls, the blue rubber football—and throw them at us while we dodged, hiding in the top of the castle. We would retaliate by throwing them back through the windows and out the front door. Sometimes we used water balloons, but that got the slides wet, so we always hurt our butts on the way down after that, and Mom would yell at Dad for being irresponsible.

            On warm nights, we would camp out in our sleeping bags in the castle, under the white tarp. Our dog, Shiloh, learned how to climb the ladder up to the trap door. We would hear a thump from under the floor and open the door to see him waiting there for us to let him in to cuddle. Dad would always let him sleep in his sleeping bag with him. But Mom never came out to the tree house. She would watch from the inside window and wait for one of us to get cold during the night and scurry inside to fall back asleep over top of the heating vents in the dining room. We would wake up with a blanket and pillow, or sometimes miraculously in our actual beds.