stillwater home forts

Go back to the forts, hideouts, stomping grounds of childhood, before they totally vanish,
before they self demolish and are used to build new flimsy dreams. Before the shed is
just used to house the riding lawnmower, and not be a lair for desperados or jedi or spies.
Brother and I built our cook-fire in the bowl shaped lid of a steel milk cannister, got a fry
pan and an egg from the kitchen, and had our second breakfast in the pines. The treehouse
was our real home, in the front yard, in the big sycamore.
I could jump to the first branch five feet up, swing my leg over it,  and climb another bunch
of feet into the walled fort my dad built for us out of new lumber. Open wind0ws, and no
roof for the first couple years, until we added a second story. We spent hours every day in
the tree, at the top, jumping off it, clamboring around it summer or winter, leafed or
bald. Tin can phones and string, blanket roofs, koolaide and squirt guns. Having friends
over to play. Throwing the balsa wood planes out of the tree, or little plastic men with
parachutes. Very oily plastic figurines.
Who else in America had their own bi-plane? Dad built ours out of plywood and two by 
fours; doubled wings, like Snoopy, box shaped and twelve feet long. Big enough to get 
into, three feet wide, with tail fins, and a closing cockpit, gauges and a propellor that
we could spin from inside, manually. The top wing was 5 feet from the ground, the lower
wing 2 feet off the grass. It was painted with a shark's mouth, a pair of dice, checkerboard
patterns. It was a remarkable asset, and solid enticement for visiting friends. Who else 
had their own plane?
Parked underneath the treehouse, or nearby, we could adventure all over the world and
not miss the city life most of our school friends took for granted. I wish I had that passport.
Our rabbit hutch was under the treehouse, for as long as we had our rabbit Foo Foo. We
f0und him on Easter hopping around our yard, white with a several moustaches and eye
rings, a baby coincidence, or escapee. Hard to remember the end of the rabbit, or the
final days of the plane. It must have rotted to an extent beyond repair, as I spent more
time after school in sports, or at the library, and been a good soggy day burn project that
I missed. 
We never had a dog house, because we only had cats, and litters of cats. Grant and I would
put them in boxes lined with cloth, and drag them around the house, to tinker-toy and
building block ghettoes, often hastily constructed with a fort of couch pillows. There was 
Mickey, and Boogie, and Quimby. They had the run of the house and the land. Boogie would
be gone for days or weeks, come back with is Maine Coon fur full of beggars lice, or withwi
torn up ears. They stayed away from the highway. There was all kinds of road kill to 
poke at down there; possums, armadillo, tortoises, coyote, deer, all kind of birds. 
The forts on wheels, our cars, were always station wagons: a Datsun, a Mazda, and
way back when a VW station wagon the size of a candy bar. The Apache pickup was the
coolest, as we got to ride in it on top of loads of firewood, or to our land with the pond,
or to the drive-in theater.
Nearby the drive-in, on our east side of town, was also the roller skating rink. I loved
skating, the chance to flirt with girls and couple-skate hand in hand, and play arcade
games, foosball and air hockey. Doing the limbo, on skates. In the winter, we ice skated
our pond and played real hockey, with a crushed can and tree limbs, all around the
beaver lodge. Forts, nests with wings, shoes with fins, homes on wheels. And then the 
inner realms of books, of study, or the rooftop to cloud watch. Coming in with shoe
laces full of stickers, a jar with fireflies, and chigger bites. Or home right at dark, a 
stringer of gasping fish that gott be cleaned as they say, out on the slab with moths
and junebugs and the cats watching, the innards of the fish on some paper sack, and
Monty Python on the TV and then it was bedtime, again, and creep mouse.