With the oldest away at college, it has been time for some clearing out.
The immediate priority was the teen’s room, about which the less said the better. A shocking amount of material pulled out of every nook and cranny and sent on its way. Her section of the bathroom, too. I had a feeling not unlike on my walk the other day when I strolled by one of the most intense hoarder situations I’ve ever seen. Sad, frightened, bewildered. Knowing that somewhere deep within most of us lies that same capability for giving up, which left unchecked results in absolute chaos.
But the flipside is huge relief. We saw the abyss, and stepped back. See, cleanup is fun!
Next I did some digital detox. My contact list has so many people I spoke to 5, 10, 20 years ago about projects that never happened. People often show up several years after an initial conversation, ready to go. But I decided that by now, “potential” clients from last decade and before can be safely tidied up. It was nice talking to you!
I touched up and painted a wall that was in terrible shape. The whole house is going to need it before too long, but having one small corner fixed up was enough for that weekend to feel successful.
Then just recently I turned to the treehouse. I’ve known for some time that that once-lovely aspirational symbol of childhood was likely a bit unsteady, and definitely not suitable for adult-sized humans. It was quite a job to build (thank you Mark for your help with the engineering and construction!). I feared tearing it down would be similarly daunting. But it turns out entropy was on my side. One definition suggests ominously that entropy “is a measure of the disorder, randomness, or dispersal of energy in a system.” For the leaf-strewn floorboards of the treehouse, there had been quite a lot of disorder and dispersal, commonly known as wood rot. A little whack with a hammer popped out much of one decomposing floorboard after another. The wood crumbled, shredded at the touch. Maybe 80% of the floor just came right off. The railings and side supports and stairs were in better shape, it took a screwdriver and wrench, but in just a few hours it was a pile of lumber debris.
No question, more time was spent in the construction of the treehouse than was ever spent playing on it. Hopefully the relatively little time to dismantle it was less than the time the kids enjoyed the thing, but I fear that too might be a close call.
10 years isn’t bad for a small project like that to last; had I done the math I could have predicted that the life of a treehouse for my kids would be less than 10 years. I think of my childhood sandbox and jungle gym, and remember them better as rusted ruins considered from young adulthood than I remember using them in their prime. Though there was that one time I clamped an electric light onto a pipe of the climbing structure and set the sprinkler on it, to recreate the colorful fountains of an amusement park that caught my fancy. That was nearly my last creative endeavor, but the power shorted out and I lived to see another day.
So strange, remembering the lived experience that’s only mine, even as it overlaps with my brother and parents and some friends and neighbors who were in and out. How I’d love to ask my folks now how they felt about the time and effort they spent setting up ping pong tables, giving me a part of the garage for my projects, putting up the Halloween and Christmas decorations each year, assembling my space-age pulldown desk shelf for my “studies.” In my memory I can see so vividly the white melamine and fake wood desk/bookshelf, with its cool chrome edges. This was the future, right here in my room.
It’s all got a shelf life, and then it’s a memory. The treehouse started as an idea, a dream. And now it’s only an idea once again. A sun-dappled hideaway for the childhood we hoped to give our kids.
