Boy in the House: 1

Them Apples

There is a giant apple tree just outside our kitchen window (there's one out the kitchen window of every mother's dream house, isn’t there? With a swing and a tree house?) The arborist, whom we practically have on retainer, estimates that the big ol’ girl is about 110, 115 years old. She’s seen a few things in her lifetime. Like the farmer’s sons go off to WWI and the like. After all, Courtland Park has been a neighbourhood for just 65 years. And we Arnold/Ashes have been here for just five … barely a wink in her long, long life.

Which is why it’s hard to complain about the apples. The dozens upon dozens (upon dozens) of apples that drop onto the playground pea gravel each summer and fall, like punishing rain. We looked into takin’er down a while back, what with the rotted core branch and the leafy encroachment onto the roof and the worry about root damage to the foundation. And the apples. But, no — no! — the arborist implored. We can save her. She can be pruned back, her rotted branches cut out (and apple trees have tap roots, dontcha know … no worries about the house). So save her we did.

But not from massive shock. The dead branch, growing from the centre of the trunk itself, was nearly two feet across, and the rest of the pruning was extensive. Mama tree’s defences were tripped, her will to procreate slammed into overdrive. She hailed down endless mini-apples last summer. Gnarled and bug-infested apples that required hours of stooping labour to scoop up and take to the curb in bag after bag of yard waste. If we procrastinated, then plagues of ants and wasps gathered to feast on the fermenting mush trampled underfoot by Sam and friends.

We invited the arborist back this spring: “Can we remove the fruiting spears and prevent the apples from growing?” No. Not yet. The stress, the trauma — it’s all been too much for the tree. Let her try again this year to make an orchard of our back yard. And she did. Oh my, how she did. This year, we counted. 2,300. Two thousand, three hundred and some odd apples fell in the side yard. I personally stooped for 1,250 in just one day (shortly after returning from a three-week holiday to find the ground carpeted with the rotting, earwig-infested fruit).

While I picked up more than my fair share, “apple picking,” as we call it, is mostly Sam’s chore. For every 100 apples he tosses into the silver trash can or yard bag, he receives one coupon (worth about a buck) towards his next toy purchase. As the summer turned to fall, the chore became less onerous and Sam became more creative. Recently, he kicked the scattered apples into a pile near the swing and invented this game.

No complaints at this point. And maybe the fruiting spears will come off next year. Mind you, Sam’s new tree house is screwed into the four remaining large branches—the perfect platform area that was created by the massive pruning. So what do you suppose the arborist will say about Mama Apple Tree’s stress next year? (Oh well, there’s always “Waaa-cha!”)

A Tree House

A tree house, a free house,

A secret you and me house,

A high up in the leafy branches

Cozy as can be house.

A street house, a neat house,

Be sure and wipe your feet house

Is not my kind of house at all -

Let's go live in a tree house.

Shel Silverstein, Where the Sidewalk Ends, 1974

Movies on the Beach

One of the awesome things about living in Ottawa is that it is such a green city—full of and surrounded by parks, rivers, hills, woods, trails and more. It’s 3 minutes to a big beach, 15 minutes to the gates of a national park, and 30 minutes or less to any number of fall fairs. But the real treats Ottawa offers up combine the best of urban and country life in fun ways. Case in point: Movies on the Beach.

Thanks to a couple of local sponsors, Movies on the Beach is free family entertainment that is reminiscent of the drive-in movies of days gone by. Every other Friday, the organizers set up a huge inflatable screen on a beach or in a park and show a popular feature length film at dusk. The program kicked off this year at the nearby Westboro Beach on June 25—the last day of school—with a screening of Avatar. Staying up and outside wayyy past bedtime? What a perfect way to mark the end of grade one!

We grabbed our beach chairs and packed our bags with sweaters, blankets, popcorn, and iced tea, heading off to Kitchissippi Point at about 7:30. It being darned close to summer solstice, we knew it would be a good while before dusk. But loads of other people were heading that way, too, so, for one, it was smart to stake some decent viewing territory. And, for two, the chance to play on the beach for a couple of hours on a warm early summer evening nearly eclipsed the movie itself for Sam and Carter.

They made fast friends with a couple of boys who were constructing sand dams and sluiceways at the water’s edge. The little group must have ferried hundreds of buckets of water while we lounged in the beach chairs well back from the water. Does it get any better than a sandy shoreline and no hovering parents? Every now and then, Sam would look up, scan the growing crowd, pick us out and wave, and then get back to it.

After the sun set right into the Big Rideau itself, we bundled up and settled in for the film. We’d all seen it before, so we half expected to be ducking out partway through, once night fell for real and the chill and fatigue set in. And the boys were in their Mickey Mouse camp chairs, which had us wondering how much of the screen they could see over the crowd in front. But their attention never wavered. It was after midnight when the credits rolled and the large crowd made its orderly way to the parking lot. When Sam caught site of the clock in the car, he exclaimed, “Carter! We stayed up until tomorrow!” That’s a good summer memory, right there.

Pirate's Life

If not for an Interaction article submission in response to a “fads & fashions” call last winter, I might never have heard tell of an annual summer event held in Alexandria Bay, New York that was seemingly tailor-made for our swashbuckling six year olds. "Bill Johnston’s Pirate Days" is a 10-day festival of all things arrghh! Sam and Carter spent Saturday in their glory, helping the town commemmorate the exploits of a famous renegade who sunkthe British steamer, Sir Robert Peel, hid among the 1000 Islands, and was hunted by U.S. and Canadian authorities.

The first order of business was pirate boat building and some scouting of the local terrain around Scenic Park. The view is spectacular, overlooking Heart Island (with its famous Boldt Castle) and a thousand other island besides, and the town itself is carved out of the rock, which crops up along roads and sidewalks and just begs for clamouring.

We got a peak at the little riverside town while parading along behind Bill himself, as he lead the charge through the village to “gather pirates” for his later invasion. The boys looked great in their homemade get-ups of cut-off jeans, a couple of Jeremy’s hacked up business shirts, pirate head gear and a practised swagger.

After terrorizing the town, we headed to Capt’s Landing—a floating restaurant around the bay from the marina—for a hearty meal and the most entertaining view the kids have ever enjoyed. Even the flotsam and jetsam (mostly flotsam) was captivating to them. And needing to get your “sea legs” just to make your way safely to “the head” was an experience in itself. “I’ve never been to the bathroom while the room was moving,” Sam shouted from the Men’s room.

Back on terra firma, we found some beach-side shade and let the boys strip down to their cut-offs and play a while in the water. They threw a happy wave at the pirate ship as it sailed by—and then high-tailed it out of the water at the first canon shot! The roar and smoke of the ensuing battle between the pirates, the steamer and the shoreline defenders, filled the air for about half an hour. Then the mayor was captured and made to walk the plank, at which point he surrendered the key to the village to the invading mauradeers. Moored alongside Scenic View Park, the pirates share the booty with the villagers (us) by flinging strings of beads into the crowd. Everyone’s a pirate!

A really hot and thirsty pirate! We headed back into town for some ice cream and a look-see at all the decorations and wares the local merchants have on display for this, their biggest event of the year. It’s crazy how happy a pair of boys can be to pick out a $3 pirate set complete with sorta-operational compass, a kinda-works spy glass and a(nother) plastic sword. Who doesn’t love a town that had streetside kiosks featuring all things skull-and-crossbone?

The two “ching-changed” in swordfight back to the car and kept up the imaginary adventure all the way home—including the hour-long stop at the 1000 Islands Skydeck, which was actually the world’s biggest crow’s nest, and whose playground featured pirate ship monkey bars and pirate ship spinny structures (at least to their minds). In fact, as we pulled in the driveway 10 hours after getting this trip underway, Sam turned to Carter and asked “So, what do you want to play? Pirates?”

Life with Little Boys

It's Saturday afternoon and my house is clean. Floors are swept, vacuumed and mopped. Tables are polished. Tub is scrubbed. Mirrored doors and window panes are muck-free. The laundry is done and put away. As is the most of the general this 'n that—the clutter that builds up around the house during the course of a busy week. There are, however, a few notable exceptions.

One: the fireplace and reading chair in the living room are connected by a pirate bridge made of leftover foam strips from the interlocking mats we picked up for the school library. Two: the bare dining room wall is adorned with the tracing paper pages of a Bakugan story Sam spent the better part of the day creating. These things I will leave be.

My Neat Freak single self couldn't imagine maneuvering a vacuum cleaner gingerly around a 10-foot pirate bridge (which went up three days ago), and she would have thought twice about agreeing to scotch tape anything to the walls. She couldn't understand why mothers would let the house be taken over by toys, why all that stuff couldn't be squared away where it belonged. In fact, she couldn't even imagine slapping a child's artwork on the fridge...and leaving it there. Wasn't that why children had their own bedrooms? No, Neat Freak Angie was happy in clean, tidy spaces that were geared to grown-ups and smelled faintly of vanilla or pear.

As Angie-Mommy, I still very much prefer a clean house, but I don't often have a neat and tidy one. Those "signs of Sammy"—the messy evidence of his play—are part of the landscape of life with a little boy. They make my heart sing with the remembrance of his joys and frustrations as he created them and then showed them off, confident in his right to fully inhabit the house—to re-engineer and redecorate as he pleases. They're wonderful in a way that you can feel only when you are fully, completely in love with a little boy whose imaginary worlds bring energy and colour and quirkiness to your real one.