Goodbye Summer

With Summer vacation coming to an end this week for most kids, I got to thinking about my summers.
My cousin Matthew Abercrombie who was one year younger than me, lived right across the road. So we spent our summers playing with each other. Behind his house were pine trees. They were all over the place. We would spend hours playing in there. I still don't know how we kept from getting a snake bite. They say the Lord looks after fools and kids.

There were trails cut through these woods. We had them named. There was Matthew Avenue and Carson Drive. We also had this little trail that would dip down, back up, and down again. We called it Roller Coaster Road. Then, somewhere, we found an old piece of would that looked like a Rocket. So we changed the name of the road to Rocket Road.

The centerpiece of our little play world was our tree house. You can see what's left of it in the picture. It used to stand about 20 feet in the air, until the legs rotted out from under it. We had a cable that ran from the top of the front porch down to a pine tree. The cable had a pulley on it, which had a rope and a handle tied to it. So we could stand at the front porch of the tree house and slide down this cable to the ground. We had hours of fun on that thing. The tree house had electricity run to it. There was a bed inside and a poster of Big Foot.

As sad as it is, the tree house has fallen and the trees have all been cut down. But I still have memories of a time when there were no worries, no cares. I sure do miss those days.