In The Treetops

You can’t stop a climber. If you’ve got one, you know what I mean. Of my four children, two are climbers and have occasionally scared me witless with their antics. If you don’t curtail the scaling of climb-prone kids, lots of people--friends, family, and strangers alike--will weigh in with both warnings and critical clucking. Addison was a runner and Keilana was a good-senser (I had to go to the tops of slides and retrieve her until she was six), but Connor and Scarlett are my monkeys. Today Scarlett, clad only in a diaper and bedhead, wedged her tiny toes into the crack between the tops of the cabinets and the bottom of the silverware drawer to heft herself up onto the counter that is higher than her head. When I asked her just what she thought she was doing, she said, “Go way me! I climbing!” Obviously. It’s no use arguing, apparently. My mother has always said I was a climber, and I believe it considering how much I love trees. Not in a tree-hugging way (well, not just in a tree-hugging way), but in a get-my-hands-dirty-pulling-myself-off-the-ground way. As a child, I spent far more time among the branches of the trees in our yard than I did earthbound--and my mom got to hear all about what a terrible mother she was from the neighbors. When we read Margaret Hodges’ The True Tale of Johnny Appleseed, I couldn’t help but feel glad that my mom never listened to the naysayers.

http://www.amazon.com/True-Tale-Johnny-Appleseed/dp/0823415090

http://www.library.pitt.edu/libraries/is/enroom/hodges/hodgesbio.htm