Englewood Story

Link: http://EyeOnEnglewood.com

When I designed the house and hired the contractor, it was with a contingency for a treehouse in the grand umbrella looking tree out back. I drew a few steps up from the deck out the back of that room and into an awaiting secret hideout in the tree.

Being a tomboy growing up, I was always intrigued with living in trees. My elder sister called me "monkey" and even tried to humiliate me by reporting my new fiancé that I used to make monkey sounds in front of the mirror. She underestimated the fortitude of Wild Bill with Shorts.

Wild Bill, or Bill with Shorts, didn’t come by those nick-names without reason. He was a man who walked to work in the Winter with his little black shorts on. He had some hot blood running through those veins. One of my favorite pictures is of him in his black shorts, black windbreaker, white socks and black sandals on a rocky volcanic mound on a stormy Vancouver coastline holding an umbrella. He looks like Christopher Robin to me somehow.

We were staying in a treehouse designed after the Canadian's Winnie the Poo stories, in a youth hostel, on Salt Spring Island that year for holiday.

On our 10th anniversary, I had bribed him to visit Africa with me by booking us in a tree house that hung over the fiery Zambezi River with crocodiles and hippos beneath, and the possibility of a green mamba snake coiled nearby.

Once, I had discovered an entire magazine of the finest treehouses in the world and dreamed for hours, days, months over it. How was it possible in America to live in a treehouse?

Well, one might buy a property with mature trees, for instance, and then design and build one from the regular house, so that one might have access to a real kitchen and a nearby potty. Yes. That’s it!

We built our home, but with the contractor fired, and my husband a nurse, not a builder of homes or even treehouses, I was a frustrated monkey to be sure.

But after our Seminary boys finished our decks for us (one was building the new Nordstroms downtown with his father who was the project manager there, and the other was an experienced framer from before Seminary days bringing in some of the bread and butter for his family because of the loss of his father who had died prematurely)... I saw that we were already IN the tree.

We no longer needed a treehouse, because the deck was embraced by the limbs of the tree. In short order, that room which was to be a den in the house became our bedroom.

Over the next two years, the wonder of our private getaway in the tree proved magical. The chatter of birds in the early morning woke us up with a childlike wonder plastered across our faces.

We pretended we lived in Africa. We pretended in the rainstorms, and on calm Saturday mornings.

We marveled at the turning of seasons in our tree. In Autumn, the transparent yellow with lemony sunshine radiating through,-- in Winter, the dramatic arching, twisting limbs of black and white, draped in snow, and in Springtime, the baby lime leaves sprouting. This room was my happiness, my secret joy.

On mornings when I had barely slept the night before because of sleepless problem solving with the various onslaughts of the neighbors and the City, I would wake up to the funny squirrels playing in the tree.

I could hear them overhead, running across the roof, see them leap into the tree, chase each other, defy each other, primp each other, hump each other, carry the small furry balls of their babies into safe hiding, and even calmly stared them down a mere two or three feet from eye to eye.

I would bring out rotting fruit as offerings to my entertaining jesters in this courtyard.

The dichotomy of our heavenly Father's loving kindness to us in the midst of our angst was a daily reprieve. In fact, we began to say, this was not the exception to our private hell, but it was rather our private heaven in which hell was attempting to overtake. That put things into perspective.

Once, during the first year of the onslaught, I attempted to propose an ordinance to the City as a remedy for the situation.

In my open records obtained from the City a short time later, I discovered how I was being mocked by the City Manager and City Attorney Brotzman. “What shall we call this ordinance?” One proposed. “Oh, that’s a no-brainer,” came the reply. “Our house is a very, very, very fine house… with two cats in the yard, life used to be so hard…” Brotzman had written.

Little did they know.