I Climbed These Trees
Most of my favorite childhood memories involve the trees in my backyard. My brothers and I spent as much time high in their limbs as we spent on the ground. We practically lived in our treehouse in the summer. But sometimes those memories seem to me more dream than remembered reality. And yet I know those memories are real, because we brothers frequently talk about our many adventures we had there: the mud pits we dug, or how bones were broken, or trips to the hospital to get stitches.
Wandering that backyard, I see myself as the boy in Shel Silverstein’s book, The Giving Tree. The tree offers the boy one bit of itself after another because making the boy happy made the tree happy. Finally all that remains of the tree is a stump, after its branches have been used to build a house, and then a boat. The final sentence of the book, as the boy, now an old man, sits on the stump rings in my ear: “And the tree was happy.”
Maybe I’ll give in to my inner child and climb those old branches. It might just make the tree happy.
