‘Once there was a tree,” Shel Silverstein writes in The Giving Tree, “and she loved a little boy.”
When children read this story, they don’t cry. The love between a tree and a boy just is. It’s the adult readers who shed quiet tears, because we realize how sadly the story unfolds, how short a time it is that we truly love trees and that they love us back, unconditionally.
The joy of a tree house also just is. Children peer down at the world from their bird’s-eye vantage point, blissfully unaware of both the work involved in building the tree house and just how quickly this stage of life will pass them by.
Looking up into these miniature domiciles, we adults can see more than a temporary housing facility for children at play. If we observe carefully, we can hear the whispered secrets of childhood itself.
For years, Skully Knight’s two girls, Emily and Katie, asked for a tree house. It just never seemed to be the “right weekend” for such an involved project. But then they asked again, and Knight happened to be in the middle of Rich Louv’s Last Child in the Woods, a book about today’s nature-deprived youth. This time, Knight found himself giving a different answer. “Yes,” he said. “Of course we can build a tree house.”
When he was much younger, he and his older brother had built their own tree houses out of scrap wood. This time around, Knight headed to the local library, looking for a plan that would work well with a single tree. He enlisted the help of his girls, then ages 9 and 12. He wanted the tree house to be something he would build with rather than for them—a real family project.
As children do, the girls would get tired long before he did. He’d remind them that when they stopped working, he would, too.
Now, with cooler weather, the girls use the tree house quite a bit, especially when friends come over to play. Emily thinks the tree house is a great place to read, and Katie finds her artistic muse in the tree branches. The girls created a dumbwaiter to haul books and art supplies back and forth.
Knight sees their family’s tree house as an ongoing project, a work in progress. He and the girls are considering adding a retractable, partial roof. Emily would love a second-tier reading nook, but that she would have to get past Mom’s veto power first.
It comes as no surprise that Dr. Steven Ripple, who sits on the Governor’s Council on Physical Fitness and Sports, extends his passion for fun and fitness to his grandchildren.
When he and his wife Jan started building their Highland Road house, they envisioned a home their entire family—including their three grown children and nine young grandchildren—could enjoy.
An advocate for outdoor play, Ripple wanted to give the little ones a place where they could safely explore, play and entertain themselves. Having both a carpenter and an architect in the family, Ripple was confident in his ability to design a space his family would love. Having previous tree house-building experience helped, too.
Looking like something straight out of Swiss Family Robinson, the Ripple tree house is only one component of this child-friendly fitness complex.
There are two entrances, three suspension bridges, a 25-foot crow’s nest, a 120-foot-long zip-line, a fireman’s pole, a trapeze, three swings that dangle from an 18-foot-high cable, and a kettle ball-shaped swing, which Lucy, age 3, navigates with ease. Her favorite part, though, is being able to color on the walls, which have been coated with dry-erase paint. With every scribble and drawing, the tree house becomes even more their own.
As a society, we are overly eager to protect our children, Ripple says. It’s through falling off a bicycle that children learn to balance, he explains. Still, he has made safety the highest priority in his design. No one, adults included, rides the zip-line without a helmet, a safety harness and another adult present. The netting along the ramps is sturdy and weather-resistant.
When children are indoors, adults often end up doing the entertaining. But with all this fun available, why would any child ever, ever want to go inside?
When Bruce Baker’s daughter Amelia was 6, she’d climb into the fork of a tree near her house and just sit. To make the climbing a little easier, Bruce nailed a few boards to the tree’s trunk. Next he added another board for sitting.
The family had just returned to Baton Rouge from North Carolina, and their pre-fab swing set was still in pieces. Baker, taking note of the tree’s shape and size, figured it was perfect for a tree house. He decided to use the playhouse part of the swing set for the tree instead.
Amelia and her friends weren’t the only ones who enjoyed playing in their new tree house. “I built it for myself, too,” Baker says. “I’m a big kid.”
That was eight years ago. Amelia’s tree-sitting days are long gone, but the tree house, which is on a bike path that cuts through this Mid City part of town, is still in use. Because of its location, it’s thought of as the neighborhood tree house.
Mary-Elliott Turner, 8, enjoys climbing up into the tree house with her siblings. She and her older sister Margaret pretend they are members of a secret club, inventing passwords to keep their younger brother out. Her favorite part is the little swing that dangles from one of the tree’s sturdy branches. “It goes really, really high,” so it’s a must, she says. So is signing your name on the tree house itself, a neighborhood ritual. “All the kids sign with a Sharpie,” she says. “So you have to remember to bring it.”
It’s not just the area youngsters who use the tree house. According to neighborhood folklore, older kids call this the “kissing tree,” sneaking smooches away from prying adult eyes.
Some even try their first puffs of nicotine hidden in the tree’s branches. And amidst the Sharpied names of kids are a few not-so-nice statements about others, but even these have an air of innocence about them. Writing so-and-so “is a reatard” seems to say more about the writer than it does the subject at hand.
Just as the neighborhood youth take ownership—for good or bad—of the tree house, the parents are taking over its maintenance. They haven’t forgotten its importance, that still-warm place in their hearts for a place of their own high above the world.
Just a few months ago, the stepping boards of the structure received fresh coats of bright paint, welcoming the young and the young-at-heart to scale the tree.
