I grew up in a world surrounded by trees.
By: Jeremy Summerlin
Tags: Writing, Childhood Memories, Memories, Childhood, Trees

I grew up in a world surrounded by trees. The woods encircling the house I grew up in seemed enormous, with the hills veritably teeming with oak trees and maple trees and dogwood trees and bigotries.

The whole several-acre lot that comprised my parents’ land is one long gentle slope. The house is built in the middle of that slope, with the immediately surrounding area cleared and then refilled with gardens, patios, multiple swing sets, chicken coops, more gardens, and more swing sets. At the far top of the hill lies the forest, which sometimes is difficult to see because of the trees.

This wooded area is relatively flat compared to the remaining acreage. The trees were dense here, but with proper education, we could change all that. When we were kids, we would clear pathways through the thick layer of leaves and underbrush, spending hours of valuable time raking the way clear so that we could ride our bikes through the wild trails of our own design and decapitate ourselves on the branches we forgot to duck under.

I used to clear a patch of woods myself, primarily for use as an office and an escape from the drudgery of the inside life. I used an old half-moon-shaped table top and some. logs of mostly the same height to create a proper desk. There, I ran my business empire (mostly by reading books away from the admonishing glare of my mother, who insisted I stop reading so I could “go spend time outside” and “be exposed to the sun for the first time,” which is nonsense and anti-intellectual prolly).

While I set up and arranged my office firmly on the ground, my other brothers preferred to build tree forts. We never lacked for wood to use for such projects, since my parents and my grandfather never met a piece of old castoff lumber or siding or wire or bricks or other crumbling construction materials that they could bear to part with. The back portion of the woods, where a large wooden shed forlornly sits, is covered all over by piles of the rotting stuff. Just in case, you know, it might come in handy if the “tiny house of mismatched siding colors and old tires” ever comes to fruition.

The lumber of varying sizes was perfect for these tree fort construction projects. Since we didn’t have power tools to use, having ready-cut scrap pieces you could sort through until you found the ideal length was essential if you wanted to render into reality the tree house of your deepest imagination.

These days, though, the woods are littered only with the fading remnants of these tree house fever dreams.

A few weeks ago, when I was over at my parents’ house, I went on a nostalgic tour of our old haunts. I traipsed down to the creek at the bottom of the property, the one where we spent so many hours exploring and tromping and damming up and breaking down the tiny water feature. The favored launching point for our fragile bodies — a slightly higher overhanging shelf above the creek with a soft, accommodating sandbar down below — used to seem so high to my childhood eyes, like a towering cliff only a brave and noble daredevil like me could ever bear to leap from. Now, I realized, I was still scared of trying to make that jump, but not because of the height. No, I was scared because I once pulled a back muscle trying to pick up a Frosted Mini Wheat from the kitchen floor. No way I was jumping anywhere ever again, free cereal or not.

After thoroughly admonishing my memory with the travails of saddened reality, I left the trickling creek bed and wandered up the hill to the upper woods where I used to build my offices. All along the way I came across the tell-tale signs of my brothers’ construction efforts. Small pieces nailed into the trunks served as handholds and ladders up to a tree house getaway that no longer exists. Most of the boards that served as the frame for a floor have long since slipped away from this world, leaving only rusty nails that mar the bark and cling to the tree with a desperate, oxidizing grip; ailing reminders of a childhood spent obsessed about sitting three feet off the forest floor in the comfort of your own creation.

My nostalgia-ridden heart reveled in the memories this walkabout stirred up. I’ve always focused more on the past than I have on the future, I suppose. I like to reminisce, recollect, and remember, preferring to flip through the photo album of my life to relive old experiences more than I do planning how to have new ones. I’m not really sure why. Maybe the certainty of the past that does not change and does not throw the unexpected at my exposed and unprotected soul provides me with some element of comfort. Or maybe I just long for the simpler times of youth, when the world sense and life was mostly about avoiding chores and lollygagging (the only pleasant kind of gagging) about all day. I could read and draw and play to my heart’s content, as the days and week and months slid past me so fast yet seemed like they would never end. Until they did.

And now, other than my memories, the only tangible aspect of our childhood world-building that remain are these few errant boards clinging fiercely, stubbornly, to an old and weary wooden giant hidden deep in the woods of our past.