Climbing Trees - 5 Minute Free Write - May 17, 2018
Free Write for Thursday, May 17, 2018
Topic: Tree
One of the first trees I ever really loved – was an orange tree. It grew down at the end of the alleyway that ran behind the house (duplex) where I grew up in Santa Barbara. My two friends and I would climb it almost every day. It wasn’t a very big tree, but we weren’t very big, either. I was about 5, 6, 7 – the years when we climbed it often. One of my friends was one year older than me and the other was 3 years younger, so she didn’t start climbing the tree til a couple years later. At first it was just me & Laura – climbing the orange tree. Since she was older than me, she was more adventurous and could climb higher – into branches higher than I could, or that I felt comfortable climbing, anyway.
We all had our own “seats” – places in the tree where it was comfortable to sit – like a chair in a tree. And, whenever Laura would find a new, higher seat, I would inherit her old one, and we’d all “move up”. Funny, looking back now – it’s like we were actually practicing our own form of office politics.
The oranges in that tree weren’t very good though, so we didn’t eat them. We usually just threw them for the neighborhood dog, Cappy. He loved chasing those oranges!
