Post by Ken_Nye on Apr 14, 2010 21:39:12 GMT -5
On the front lawn of the house where I grew up
was a huge old apple tree
with a trunk that must have been ten feet around.
That tree was the compass by which
all other things in the yard
were located:
"Where'd you leave the lawn mower?"
"About ten feet on the other side of the apple tree."
"Where did you say that hornets' nest was?"
"About forty feet on the up-hill side of the apple tree."
I knew every knothole in that old tree.
I can still visualize the huge limb that took off
out over the lawn forty to fifty feet up.
My goal was to someday climb to the very tip of that limb.
And that day finally arrived.
I screwed my courage to the sticking post,
took a deep breath,
and began to carefully pick my way
up the limb,
grasping young green branches for support
and carefully placing my foot on the main limb itself,
stepping over cross limbs and branches that
were impediments to my goal.
Whens I reached the end of the top branch,
(the point on the limb that I felt
could still support my weight,)
I breathed a sigh of relief
and accomplishment.
Pushing clustering branches aside,
I sat down on the limb,
dangling my legs,
fifty feet up in the air.
At that point my dad drove up the driveway,
and as he got out of the car,
he saw my legs dangling down below the leaves,
and then he saw the rest of me,
sitting on the tip of the limb.
He said, "What in the world are you doing up there?"
I said, "I wanted to get to the very end of the limb."
He said, "Why?"
I said, "I don't know."
He just looked at me for a few seconds, and then he said,
"Why don't you climb back down."
I said, "OK."
On the house side of the trunk of the apple tree was a knothole
about the size of a baseball.
Walking up the driveway
after the school bus had dropped me off,
I heard that knothole challenging me to throw a snowball
down its throat.
So I put my school books
on the front steps,
bent down and scooped up some of the wet snow at my feet
and made a baseball-size snowball .
I went into my windup and let fly.
The snowball went right into that knothole.
It couldn't have been a more perfect throw.
It was so perfect no part of the snowball
even touched any part of the knothole opening.
I was amazed.
Thinking that it wasn't as hard as I had thought
it was going to be to get a snowball in the knothole,
I bent down and scooped up another handful of snow,
made another snowball,
went into my windup and let fly with another one.
I wasn't even close to the knothole.
As a matter of fact, I didn't even hit the tree.
I spent the next hour and a half
trying to throw another snowball into that knothole.
I came close twice.
When I think back to those days and that house,
the first thing I see in my mind
is that old apple tree,
throwing a huge shadow over the lawn,
shade from the hot summer sun,
jungle-gym for little boys searching for challenges
with which to prove they are ready
to take on the world.
