Defining Moments

Defining Moments - Part 1: Sean - Chapter 1

To me though, the yard was the magic of the place. It was only a few acres, but at the time it seemed like hundreds. There were three large flat lawns, which my Dad was constantly nagging my lazy older brothers to mow, and dozens of enormous maple and chestnut trees. Each fall the trees would blanket the yard a foot deep in leaves of the most amazing colors. It made a lot of work for us kids, since it was our job to rake them all up - a mindless and tedious job that seemed to go on for months.  To ease the boredom, we’d rake the leaves into huge piles and then take running leaps into the middle, scattering them everywhere. Of course you never torpedoed your own pile - no way - I always took out my older sister’s, just to bug her.  Never my brothers’ though - I knew they’d pound on me for that…  Eventually we’d get all these piles moved back to the fire pit, manned by my Dad, where the low burning embers gave off a spicy smoke that filled the whole yard, blending deliciously with the earthy scent of the decaying leaves and the cold, crisp fall air.  My favorite leaves were those from the maple in the left corner of the front yard, pink with white swirls - so unique and amazing.  Thinking back now, I wonder if that is an imagined memory.

There were more than a dozen giant maples in the yard. Each one looked a hundred feet tall, at least from the four foot perspective of a nine year old - too big to climb, anyway - but the cedar tree on the back lawn was perfect, with wide solid branches; set out like climbing rungs on either side of twin trunks.  Someone had managed to haul an old green frame and panel door about thirty feet up into the high branches and this was the platform from which we surveyed the neighborhood.  With an old brown wooden ladder - seconded from some forgotten bunk bed - we were able to gain access to the lowest limbs, about five feet up from the ground.  It had taken me a good month to muster the strength, and courage, to make the swinging jump and leg loop-grab needed to get from the top step of the ladder to the first branch of the climb, but by July of ‘66 I was a nimble acrobat swinging like a monkey up to that green door platform any time the mood took me.

Initially, I had wondered why there was only the platform - rather than a full fledged tree house.  But when I finally made it up there for the first time and sat enjoying the high vantage, all became clear to me.  It was breathtaking - I felt like I could leap from the side and fly.  We could see for miles out over the river, where cabin cruisers and sail boats were mere dots on the water.  To have a wall or rail of any type would have been a violation of freedom.

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Heather McIntyre was my inseparable companion that summer, a girl my own age from two houses down the road (which in this neighborhood was about a half a mile away). The accident happened at the height of our summer vacation, in late July when we could count on sunny days and scorching, muggy heat. In the mornings we slept in late, then we would meet across the road and take the long path down through the waist high grass, squeezing through a short thicket of scratchy bushes to the beach on the river.  Being sufficiently close to the Bay of Fundy, the river had a tide cycle that varied some four to eight feet, and if the tide was too high or too low, then we would swim instead in the small twelve foot round wading pool that my Dad had set up for my little brother, near that cedar tree on the side lawn. In the afternoons, we’d play croquet or ‘adventurer’, watch the evil doings of Rachael on TV’s “Another World”, or go back to the beach for more diving and swimming.  Most days too, we’d climb the cedar tree to the dizzying height of the green door platform, to spy on my brothers or the old crabby couple in the cottage behind our house, or just to enjoy a cool escape from the muggy afternoon heat.

Heather was a curly haired redhead, as extreme in her wispy thin frailty as I in my chubby vigor. There was nothing frail about her temperament though. As regular as our morning swims was our afternoon dust-up, a kicking, scratching, hair pulling, screaming match which had first alarmed, and later amused, our mothers.