A little over a year ago I was in my mother’s basement. I opened a drawer in a worktable and saw the fiberglass handled hammer that was kept in the junk drawer of the kitchen in the days of my youth. She wasn’t called “Handy Elaine” for nothing.
The hammer brought back a lot of memories. It was the “go to” tool for many kinds of tasks. My brothers & I used it as an axe. Behind our house (I never knew who owned the property) was a small forest ideal for building tree houses. With the claw of the hammer we chopped down small trees that we called choke cherry trees. The trees became the beams to support the tree house. We nailed them in place as high as we could up in larger trees.
My dad was a builder. We found a lot of “cut nails” in the nail bin in the garage. They worked fine for tree house construction. After the triangle shaped frame was attached to 3 well placed trees, we chopped down more choke cherry trees and made cross members to put on the frame. Building this kind of primitive tree house was an end in itself. I don’t remember using them much after the build, but as I recall my sister fell out of one and broke her arm. When we got older, we learned to salvage scrap wood from construction waste dumps and recycle what high water left on the banks of the Merrimack River. This we used to build bridges over the creek behind the house.
Alas, kids aren’t allowed to roam any more. Things have gone full circle, but with my grandson there is more supervision than we had. I don’t trust him with anything sharp, but was able to get him a better tree cutting tool than we had. We are building Eeyore’s house on the ground.
Adventures in Suburbia 