Day 9 – Trees were made to be climbed…

Day 9: Trees were made to be climbed…

I don’t think kids climb trees anymore, but it was one of our favorite things to do. We had six trees in our yard at 1101 Colonial Avenue, five Pecan, and one cedar and I climbed all of them.

The Pecan Trees in the backyard were huge, at least 20+ feet in the air, and stretched out over the street that ran along the side of our house. If there were no low-hanging limbs, we would find a way to hug the trunk and inch our way up to the first limb. Today someone would probably call Child Services and report the parents, but back then we would climb out on the thinnest limb we could 20 feet over the street and bob up and down making the tree sway, we must have had a number of guardian angels working overtime to keep us safe…we were real monkeys.

My sister Debby fell out of at least three trees that I can remember and was knocked out a few times, never seriously injured, but I never fell. I guess I thought I was invincible. I never personally did it, but a friend of mine would climb a pine tree in a pine grove, get to the top and start to make the tree sway back and forth. At just the right time, he would jump to the next tree and start again. We didn’t have a lot of TV to watch back then (only 2 channels in our town) and there were no video games or computers, so we entertained ourselves with wonderful adventures like climbing trees.

I used these memories in one of my “Stories for Joshua” when Joshua and his friend Nathan climbed a big tree on a hill so they could see Jerusalem and the Temple…it was a fun memory of my childhood. Those boys in my stories lived in the first century AD so they had to make up games and entertain themselves, so I drew from a lot of my childhood to write those scenes. You can find them at www.goodnewspublications.com

Trees meant leaves, so every fall Debby and I would have to rake leaves and pick up all the Pecans that fell from those trees. We would rake the piles to the gutters in the street, then Daddy would come out and supervise the burning…he never did any raking, that was left to us. I loved the smell of the burning leaves and back then everyone did it. There were no “pollution” freaks yelling at you and certainly no trash collection of leaves, grass clipping or anything like what we have today.

We would jump over the burning piles through the smoke and not think a thing of it. Some might think that was unsafe for little kids to jump over burning piles of leaves. But that was nothing compared to the foggy machine.

What was a foggy machine? Well, in eastern NC we had mosquitos and the best way to get rid of them was for a Jeep to pull and a machine that put out a thick fog of white smoke to kill the mosquitos.

When the machine would come down the street, all our friends would come out and we would gleefully run behind it weaving in and out of the thick white cloud it left behind. No one questioned it, we were just kids having fun. No one stopped us or said it wasn’t safe. As you came out of the cloud, the white smoke would linger on your clothes for a moment and then fade away.

We didn’t breathe in the cloud, just ran through it. It was years later that we found out that the cloud was DDT, now a band, deadly substance…who knew? We played hard and lived life to the fullest, that’s just what you did in those days.