Climbing Trees in Old

Today I was looking at one of the trees in my tiny mobile home yard. When I moved here, there was a single little maple the Park had planted. Then my dad gave me a very small honey locust. Then I planted another and another just grew kind of sneakily by itself. Hey, mind if I grow here? Fine with me. The maple has grown steadily but not as fast as the Locust. I did something right here because all trees seem healthy and strong despite a clay soil base. I like to throw out produce garbage in my yard. Or leaves from indoor plants. I grind up the produce leavings from the kitchen. I had an expensive indoor composting machine for a few years, but those things broke down easily. Now I just use a food grinder, add coffee grounds to make it look earthy, and put it in the yard. In the past year, I started adding store-bought topsoil. Covers it nicely. Guerrilla composting. Compost piles are not allowed here. I feel good about it.

As I was saying…
Today I was looking at one of the trees in my yard. The largest. With the eyes of a child I noted how the limbs were within reach of climbing - if I were a child. How to get to the first branches then how high could I climb and could this or that branch bear my weight? I recall that IS how my youthful mind assessed trees so long ago. Ah, and the view once you reached a safe perch above the ground. The birds flying past and trying to imagine what they thought seeing me. Sometimes calling out to surprised people passing by beneath. Then some adult yelling at me to “get down before you fall down!” Which is what my present adult mind said to the child me up in a tree.

It is amusing how we change our views of actions with age. I think of a kid climbing THAT tree in my yard and I feel terrified of the dumb bastard falling. The dumb bastard child me up in the tree is full of confidence and grinning about it. NOT having learned the fear of falling yet.

Like so many things in life. We LEARN to fear or we climb and reach for the sun.