In my long lost and fabled youth, I was quite the tree climber. If the limbs were low enough, I'd be scrambling my way upwards. More times than I could count I would be stand or sitting high above the ground, swaying with the branches in the breeze.
Drove my Mother nuts.
These days, the ground is high enough, thanks. On this, I'm not in the shape I used to be. It's a shame, but I don't really miss the experience.
One of the last times I was in a tree was when I was nineteen. I wasn't very high up; just standing there on one of the lower limbs.
My brother Eric (of Blue Brutal) was there with me, though he was on the ground. We were talking about something. It might have been a movie, or a videogame, or general reminiscence of things gone past. I now misremember the moment.
In the main, it's unimportant.
What is important is that, at one point in the conversation, Eric jumps up and hangs off of the branch I was standing on. Which, I suppose, I might have done myself, if our positions were reversed. Just something to do.
I don't remember much of the fall, either. One moment I'm in the tree, the next I was on the ground with the branch beneath me. Our combined weight snapped it right off.
We got lucky and neither of us were really hurt. Which, when I look back on things, is the final line of oh so many stories about my youth. "Fortunately we weren't scarred or damaged in any way." By rights we should have had several broken bones, and that's not even taking this incident into account.
The big Ego Boost here is that, in all of my years of tree climbing, I never did anything as dumb as what Eric did.
So I've got that going for me.
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