"The Fort" (A children's story)

“Dad, I want a tree house” said 5 year old David. David had spent the night at a friends house the other night, and the friend had a tree in the backyard that had some wooden stairs and a platform with rails. David was very impressed.

“But David, we don’t have any trees in our yard big enough to build a tree house” his father said in a sad tone. “Okay”, said David in an uncharacteristically upbeat tone. I’ll figure something out.

When Saturday morning rolled around, David told his dad he was going out into the cove to explore the vacant lot that was known as “the woods”. It was a simple pie-shaped undeveloped residential lot with trees and overgrown bushes and weeds. In the middle was a bunch of wooden boxes and a long log that had been strategically placed to serve as the neighborhood meeting place for the “8 or 9 kids in the cove”.

An hour later, David’s father went outside to get the newspaper at the end of the driveway, and he could hear a whimpering cry “Dad, help! I can’t get down!”. David’s Dad looked up above the vacant lot and saw David at the very top of a 40 foot tree, holding on for dear life. David’s dad called the fire department who rushed a bucket truck to rescue David.

David explained that he wanted to see if he could turn the tree into a tree house. His dad knew he had to get a tree house before David got an even crazier idea into his head.

David and his Dad went to the hardware store and bought a bunch of lumber and proceeded to build a free-standing 2 story tree house with a roof, a ladder to go up, and a slide to go down. Since it wasn’t in a tree, they decided to call it a fort. It toke a full weekend to build the “fort” and David was as happy as he could be.

David’s one year old brother, Sam, was too young to climb up into the fort, but every once and a while, the4 Dad would hand Sam up to David and they would play in the fort – sometimes for hours at a time. Sam could slide down the slide without any problem. A few years later, Molly was born and they got a dog named Maggie.

As David and Sam grew older they would still play in the fort, and many of the neighborhood kids would hang out in the backyard fort, doing whatever kids do at that age. The dog – Maggie, learned to take a running start to climb up the slick stainless steel slide to get to the kids on the second story of the fort.

Eventually, Molly was handed up to Sam and David and the three of them would play all day long in and around the fort. The trees in the backyard had grown considerably by this time and the fort was camouflaged in the trees. When the kids were in the fort, it seemed to be closed off from the rest of the world.

Their father got remarried and they sold the house, but the new house they moved into had a big backyard and the woman the dad married had a 6 year old son named Josh. The father decided to take the fort apart, make any needed repairs and reassemble it at the new house. The slide - after 10 years - had rotted, so the father improvised by installing a cooper pole for the kids to slide down. Josh loved his new “fort” and played in it with his friends all the time. Josh had pictures of his favorite Basketball team in the fort and a box full of “personal treasures’ that only a 6 year old boy could find of value.

By this time, David and Sam had already gone off to college and Molly was into “girl stuff”. The father was happy that the “fort that love built” had found a new life with Josh. As time went on, Molly went off to college and Josh grew up and started to drive. The fort sat in the back yard with no one to play with it. Summer surrendered to winter over an over again, and one day the father noticed that the fort had become dangerously rotted and it was no longer safe. The father decided he had to take it down.

The father built the fort when he was 32. Now he was 57. He waited until a beautiful fall weekend to dismantle the fort, and started taking it apart gently, one board at a time. It was very emotional, almost like putting an old family pet to sleep. The compassion and respect the father had for the fort was, of course, because of all the memories he had of his kids playing there.

As he dismantled the fort, he noticed that a lot of the wood was still salvageable, and he decided that he didn’t want to let go of the memories of the fort, so he decided to let the fort live by re-using the wood. He built his wife a beautiful garden surrounded by the heavy wood posts that supported the fort, and he no longer felt so sad about taking the fort down.

Just as the kids had grown and changed, just as the father had grown and changed – the fort had grown and changed.