May 14th, 2010 10:47 am

Late summer of 1960 I entered the first grade.

The road was gravel that took us to our three-bedroom one bath home on about three acres. Woods were to the west with an old horse barn at its end. A basketball hoop was raised on its outside. We learned to play on dirt and grass surrounded by corn and soybean fields.

As the seasons went by and the corn grew tall, we wouldn’t be able to see the very few farms across the fields, until the harvest came. Sometimes the farmers would lift me up onto their large tractors and combines and I would ride with them for a while. It made my mother nervous, but it was a wonderful world. To watch from plowing to harvest was intoxicating.

The full basement was a Godsend. There were ten of us kids then; the eleventh would arrive spring of ‘66. Privacy was hard to find.

My older brothers and dad had built a tree house adjacent to the barn. The eighteen-foot rope ladder was hard to climb, but it led to a magical world. A place of innocence and thoughts of the things the future might bring. I would sit up there for hours by myself and cast out over the fields and trees in the distance. Rising above them all was the wooden water tower in the small town three miles away.

You would hear a train in the distance from time to time. I imagined walking down its wooden tracks and iron rails with a girl my age, someone I did not know, but someone who lived inside of me. Walking hand in hand without saying a word, for there were no words to say. It was an innocent relationship for the world did not have a part in it. So we would just walk with no destination in mind, for just being together and holding hands was more than enough.

The tree house is gone now. I drove by many years ago and saw it was slowing falling, slowly returning to the soil from where it had come. But it does not matter for I still climb the rope ladder. Still sit on the wooden boards high above the ground and gaze into the distance and hear a train from time to time.