The Fort

When I was seven years old, a new family moved into the house next door.  They had an older daughter, a son, and a brand-new baby.  The son was my age, and we hit it off immediately.  That was back before people connected through electronic devices, so our time together consisted of playing outside, spying on the neighbors, and harassing our siblings.  CC was an odd kid back then.  I don’t think there was ever day that I saw him that he didn’t have long pants on, even in the sweltering Texas summers.  When I asked him about it one day, he said that he was embarrassed at how white his legs were.  I told him that he would never get a tan wearing long pants, but every day he busted out the long pants.  Nowadays, it’s hard to get him to wear long pants.  He even got a job as a PE teacher, so he could be in shorts all the time!  But I digress.

CC’s dad built him a fort in the back yard out of landscape timbers.  In reality, it was just a box with a door and no roof, but to us, it was a fort…our base of operations, from which we planned all of our spy missions, launched our assaults, and went to get out of the summer heat.  We drug some plywood over the top to give us some shade, and we even built a little refrigerator in it out of bricks.  I suppose you could say it was like a real-life Minecraft.  The refrigerator was a brilliant idea.  We cooled the bricks and then stacked them up in the darkest part of the fort.  Since bricks take a long time to heat up and a long time to cool down, they would stay cold practically all day.  We could put drinks and candy in there, go do our thing, and come back to cold refreshments.  Brilliant!

We spent almost every day in the fort, until a family of hornets decided that it looked like a good spot to make a home.  It was never quite the same after that.  Not to mention that over the years, we got too big to fit inside and our interests generally changed.  We cared less and less about planning make-believe spy missions, and more and more about girls and basketball.  But it was a good fort, and much more than most boys have as children.