Admitting Defeat

I finally started taking down the fort the other day. It stayed up far longer than it needed to. No one's been in it for years and like so many things around here, if it sits around long enough, it just becomes a place to collect junk.. which it has.

I built this for the kids years ago. We have a pretty tiny yard and the kids were getting a little bigger. Our already small yard felt even smaller. Add to that the fact that our old-hand-me down swing set was getting beyond dilapidated, some might even say it was a hazard, what with all the rust and sharp metal edges (I preferred to think of it as a life lesson), it was time to do something about it.

I had just left my previous job so I used my remaining store discount and bought some lumber and hardware and swings and a slide. I spent a couple of weekends with a borrowed saw and a borrowed set of directions putting this thing together. I have no idea how I stood it up once it was done, but it stood under the shade of our neighbor's maple tree ever since.

When the three older kids were small, it got quite a bit of use. It served as an observatory over neighbors yards and bird nests. And it gave them a bit privacy from time to time- a rare commodity for a large family in a small house. It gave them a bit of control by having a place they could call their own; somewhere where they were in charge.

On a couple of occasions I brought lunch out to them so they could eat it in their spaceship or clubhouse or pirate ship... or whatever it happened to be on that particular day. Like so many things, it was like a touchstone to my past when my mom would fix me a sandwich to eat out in the park on a summer's day. Somehow that lunch tasted more special than when I had the exact same lunch in the school cafeteria.

But the kids got older and it was used less and less. As much as I tried, Sam never took much interest in it. I don't know if it had to do with the height or if it just wasn't his thing- being outside as it was. So it rarely got used in recent years.

Like I said, I left it up much longer than I needed to. A part of me felt like I was leaving the door open for someone or something to return, even though I knew better. It's a little like one of those rabbit traps you make when you're a kid- the kind where you set a carrot underneath a box that's propped up by a stick and the stick has a string around it. When the rabbet comes to eat the carrot, you pull the string and presto, you've trapped a rabbet that is now yours to keep. At least that was always the plan. It never worked for me when I was a kid.

It hasn't worked for me as an adult either.