Monday, November 23, 2009

Tree House

We had a large flowering cherry in the back yard at 45 Locust Street in Garden City, Long Island. We moved in during the winter of 1963 and the next spring my father, brother, and I decided to construct a tree house in the cherry tree. The tree’s trunk divided into two large limbs about three feet off the ground. We picked a spot where the limbs leveled off about twenty feet off the ground for the tree house. We purchased two fifteen feet logs at the lumberyard, hoisted them into the tree running from one limb to the other parallel to the ground. So as not to hurt the tree we lashed them around the limbs with hemp rope. The two logs were now level in the tree, and we nailed planks every six inches across the logs. We had our tree house – safe, hidden, secure, and towering above the rest of the neighborhood.

—Dana O'Brien

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