Stanley’s Pines
The year my father’s mother passed away (1958) brought great change to my family. I was five years old when granny died. That was the year dad started constructing a new home in the country, on Cantelou Road, so he could be near his aging father. Our house under construction was on a corner lot next to the thickest grove of trees I’d ever seen. Yes, I’d seen trees before; our city streets had trees. That conglomeration of trees, near our new home, was new to me; there were so many. My young eyes couldn’t see beyond the tree line. Little did I know, that wooded area which I came to know as Stanley’s Pines, would become my playground, my babysitter, and a place I’d love for years to come.
The area we moved to was mostly a farming …show more content…
We would rake the straw to clear the land for our tepees; yes, we built tepees. We would use logs from some of those young trees that we'd ridden down and broken under the constant strain of being ridden by us, and the pines trees now old and dry from earlier groups of kids, who by now had grown up. We’d gather the broken trees that had survived decay, and group them in a triangular format, just like the Native Americans used to do. We would use string to tie the poles at the top before raising them. Then, we’d search the woods for whatever smaller or shorter sticks we could find as siding to support the last layer of pine straw used for closing off the tepee. We would use the straw from the mounds we’d so carefully raked into piles.
The work we kids put into forming our own place in Stanley’s Pines was an ongoing task. We developed a system for building our tepees; it would take 2-3 days to complete one structure. Pine straw was constantly falling, so we’d have a crew to keep the straw under control. This didn’t slow our building process, as it was enough of us to make the chores of our community in the pines easy. As we'd finish each structure, someone would claim it either as a house, or a business, a hospital, or anything that would pop into the heads of a child with an imagination; we even had a grocery store out there in the …show more content…
Sometimes we’d find a toad or two, even baby birds that perhaps had fallen from a nest, our puppies, when we could catch them and make them stay on as patients. Once we had a really fat toad we’d caught after a really hard rain; he was under some fresh fallen pine straw. He was too fat to be normal, so we decided he needed an operation. Someone went home and got razor blades, another went home to find needles, and I went home for thread and alcohol. We all met back at the hospital in the pines and actually cut our patient open to have a look; then we sewed him back up. He was still alive that evening when we were all called to our separate homes. Anxious to check on our patient, we were all back at the hospital in the pines as early as possible the next morning. Our toad was gone; we searched frantically for our patient, he was never
The year my father’s mother passed away (1958) brought great change to my family. I was five years old when granny died. That was the year dad started constructing a new home in the country, on Cantelou Road, so he could be near his aging father. Our house under construction was on a corner lot next to the thickest grove of trees I’d ever seen. Yes, I’d seen trees before; our city streets had trees. That conglomeration of trees, near our new home, was new to me; there were so many. My young eyes couldn’t see beyond the tree line. Little did I know, that wooded area which I came to know as Stanley’s Pines, would become my playground, my babysitter, and a place I’d love for years to come.
The area we moved to was mostly a farming …show more content…
We would rake the straw to clear the land for our tepees; yes, we built tepees. We would use logs from some of those young trees that we'd ridden down and broken under the constant strain of being ridden by us, and the pines trees now old and dry from earlier groups of kids, who by now had grown up. We’d gather the broken trees that had survived decay, and group them in a triangular format, just like the Native Americans used to do. We would use string to tie the poles at the top before raising them. Then, we’d search the woods for whatever smaller or shorter sticks we could find as siding to support the last layer of pine straw used for closing off the tepee. We would use the straw from the mounds we’d so carefully raked into piles.
The work we kids put into forming our own place in Stanley’s Pines was an ongoing task. We developed a system for building our tepees; it would take 2-3 days to complete one structure. Pine straw was constantly falling, so we’d have a crew to keep the straw under control. This didn’t slow our building process, as it was enough of us to make the chores of our community in the pines easy. As we'd finish each structure, someone would claim it either as a house, or a business, a hospital, or anything that would pop into the heads of a child with an imagination; we even had a grocery store out there in the …show more content…
Sometimes we’d find a toad or two, even baby birds that perhaps had fallen from a nest, our puppies, when we could catch them and make them stay on as patients. Once we had a really fat toad we’d caught after a really hard rain; he was under some fresh fallen pine straw. He was too fat to be normal, so we decided he needed an operation. Someone went home and got razor blades, another went home to find needles, and I went home for thread and alcohol. We all met back at the hospital in the pines and actually cut our patient open to have a look; then we sewed him back up. He was still alive that evening when we were all called to our separate homes. Anxious to check on our patient, we were all back at the hospital in the pines as early as possible the next morning. Our toad was gone; we searched frantically for our patient, he was never