The door had opened and closed at least a dozen times. In between the snap of the latch and the thud of wood against its opposite wall, buffered as it happens by winter coats draped over pegs, the evenly paired slaps of my son’s sneakered feet pummeled the floor.
Click-click, slam. Thud. Wubba-wubba. Wubba-wubba. Click-click, slam.
Then the tell-take clattering of rummaging hands.
Over and over and over again, the mantra and melody of boyhood made its cacophonous presence known.
Ordinarily, this racket of repetition would have made me grit my teeth and pull out my hair by the root. But the house’s standard silence, granted only by the solitary play of pocket devices, can be overwhelming to a mother’s guilt.
You see, my son had been puttering around outside in the crisp fall air for longer than I would have wagered money. This communing with his imagination and the great outdoors was a miracle of modern proportion, and I didn’t want to jinx it.
His brief trips back to civilization eliminated any inclination of mine to hover. As one might when children are building their own pint-sized version of the American Dream, a clubhouse in the trees.
Notice I did not say “treehouse.”
This distinction, his father assured me, was the key to safety when it comes to allowing 10-year-old builders to do-it-themselves.
“Mom! Have you seen my hammer?”
For the better part of a week, since his father had planted a decommissioned packing crate in the center of a small grove of trees in our backyard, this has been the boy’s routine after school.
Just a few boards, some nails, what little remains of a half gallon of green paint and some ingenuity is all that’s needed to live this dream.
In a few hours time, the bits and bobs he begged from our closets and castoffs began to take the shape of a diminutive dwelling.
A blanket tacked up for a door. A little more begging (of his father’s time) would buy him a second floor and some railings for safety, but not a roof. A roof on his budget, his dad, explained, would go over budget and wouldn’t get OSHA approval.
Soon friends would clamor to help.
Pairs of pals, happily hammering away into the afternoon. They would hone the fancy curved-nail technique of tacking various lengths of thin plywood paneling to studs that been safely secured by a Dad.
A proper clubhouse with a patchwork of ruff-edged walls, inexpertly aligned so that the resulting gaps accidentally provided the perfect peepholes to help protect all the club’s secrets, which, at this point in its development, amounted to a couple of floppy bean bag chairs and an armload of pilfered snacks.
“Mom, do you have any more blankets we could have? We need something to keep out the wind.”
I hand him a stack with a smile.
“We’re almost ready to give tours,” he exclaimed with a new seriousness that turns his inner wood shop elf into a shirt-collared docent.
And I am almost ready to view this rickety palace of our dreams. I just have to quiet my inner child’s green-eyed envy.
Click-click, slam. Thud. Wubba-wubba. Wubba-wubba. Click-click, slam.
Then the tell-take clattering of rummaging hands.
Over and over and over again, the mantra and melody of boyhood made its cacophonous presence known.
Ordinarily, this racket of repetition would have made me grit my teeth and pull out my hair by the root. But the house’s standard silence, granted only by the solitary play of pocket devices, can be overwhelming to a mother’s guilt.
You see, my son had been puttering around outside in the crisp fall air for longer than I would have wagered money. This communing with his imagination and the great outdoors was a miracle of modern proportion, and I didn’t want to jinx it.
His brief trips back to civilization eliminated any inclination of mine to hover. As one might when children are building their own pint-sized version of the American Dream, a clubhouse in the trees.
Notice I did not say “treehouse.”
This distinction, his father assured me, was the key to safety when it comes to allowing 10-year-old builders to do-it-themselves.
“Mom! Have you seen my hammer?”
For the better part of a week, since his father had planted a decommissioned packing crate in the center of a small grove of trees in our backyard, this has been the boy’s routine after school.
Just a few boards, some nails, what little remains of a half gallon of green paint and some ingenuity is all that’s needed to live this dream.
In a few hours time, the bits and bobs he begged from our closets and castoffs began to take the shape of a diminutive dwelling.
A blanket tacked up for a door. A little more begging (of his father’s time) would buy him a second floor and some railings for safety, but not a roof. A roof on his budget, his dad, explained, would go over budget and wouldn’t get OSHA approval.
Soon friends would clamor to help.
Pairs of pals, happily hammering away into the afternoon. They would hone the fancy curved-nail technique of tacking various lengths of thin plywood paneling to studs that been safely secured by a Dad.
A proper clubhouse with a patchwork of ruff-edged walls, inexpertly aligned so that the resulting gaps accidentally provided the perfect peepholes to help protect all the club’s secrets, which, at this point in its development, amounted to a couple of floppy bean bag chairs and an armload of pilfered snacks.
“Mom, do you have any more blankets we could have? We need something to keep out the wind.”
I hand him a stack with a smile.
“We’re almost ready to give tours,” he exclaimed with a new seriousness that turns his inner wood shop elf into a shirt-collared docent.
And I am almost ready to view this rickety palace of our dreams. I just have to quiet my inner child’s green-eyed envy.
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