Had some trouble around treehouse a time or two

My mother allowed us to build our own tree house.

Knowing the limited extent of my engineering and building skills today, that seems like a really bad choice she made. But with two-by-fours, plywood, ten-penny nails, old blankets and corrugated tin we built a multi-level clubhouse/fort that, in our eyes, put the Swiss Family Robinson to shame.

I don’t think anyone ever fell out of the tree house or ever really got hurt but we did get ordered out of the fort among the treetops on a couple of occasions — once as partial punishment for our actions in the tree house and another time to protect us. Both incidents involved firearms and my mother.

The time we were punished was for gun battles with our BB guns. We weren’t actually using BBs; someone might get hurt with live ammo. What we were doing was breaking off elm tree twigs to stick in the muzzles of the air rifles and shooting them at our siblings and cousins.

This was quite exciting and fun until someone was hit on the side of the face and that child jumped down and ran into the house crying. It barely left a red mark but my mother quickly decided she wasn’t going to miss the opportunity to teach us a gun safety lesson.

She ordered us all down from the tree house, lined us up on the bed and taped our eyes shut. We were ordered to think about what could happen if we shot someone’s eye out. Keep in mind this was years before the movie “A Christmas Story” made the phrase “you’ll shoot your eye out kid,” popular.

My brother and I knew we should have been beat with a belt so we were pretty welcoming to this form of “mental” punishment. The faker that got the trouble started put on a really good show, however.

The other time we got ordered out of the trees wasn’t so much an order as it was a scream that there was a snake in the tree. We all bailed out of the fort pretty quickly.

My mother decided the snake needed to be killed before her kids went back to the tree so she called around to likely spots where my dad might be found. We had guns and ammo in the house but she didn’t know what went with what or really how to load and shoot them.

After dad failed to show, she wound up taking to a lady friend who offered to bring her .22 caliber rifle out. The lady wasn’t so great a shot and I guess after the BB gun incident Mom wasn’t about to turn a real firearm over to me for a crack at the snake. Instead, she took an off-hand bead on that snake and shot him right out of that tree.

Dad saw the dead snake but I don’t think he ever believed Mom had shot it out of the tree. But I saw it with my own eyes and that’s how my mother rolls.

Karl Terry writes for Clovis Media Inc. Contact him at: [email protected]