My Tree Story

When I was about two, three, maybe four, my family and I moved to Ridgewood, New Jersey. Maybe about two months later, my dad wanted to put some stuff in our backyard. It wasn’t that big, so we couldn’t put anything extremely big, and that was fine with me.

Ridgewood, for those who haven’t known, has won an award several times for their trees, so we wanted to do something with trees.

First, my dad started out with putting a swing set up. I helped him with that, I supervised it. Once that was done, he put up this tree house-like thing. It had a ladder to go up, a railing on both sides, and a slide on the opposite side. This tree house-like thing is a big thing of history in our back yard, of my fear of spiders, my sister almost hurting herself drastically, and many, many other things.

When I was still about four or five, my sister was about eight or nine. She got her first geared bike, and we still have that bike ‘till this day. I was inside, watching T.V. or something. My mom was the one who actually told this story:

The way I heard it was, my sister didn’t get hurt in the end; my dad was able to stop her at the last second. So my mom and dad said that she was climbing the ladder with her bike. I have yet to know how she carried it up there, but she got it up there. She put it down in front of the slide and mounted onto the bike. I’m not sure if she was wearing a helmet or not, but either way it would hurt in the end. Luckily, my dad was able to run out there and stop her before anything drastic would happen. This would be one of those stories that whenever we talk about it, we always laugh in the end, not exactly sure if we’re laughing at my sister or not.

Now my story:

When I was about six or seven, I was scared of spiders. Who isn’t? My sister had to do a report on trees, leaves, or spiders, I can’t remember which, but it was about eight o’clock so it was already dark. Both my sister and me went up onto our little structure and before I knew what was happening, my sister was shaking the branches. I kind of backed off, I didn’t want to get hit and I wasn’t exactly sure what she was doing. Then I felt something on my shoulder. I looked over and there was this huge spider on my shoulder. I remember yelling, my sister glaring at me, half sliding, half running down the slide and running into my house. I scared my parents, I think, because they seemed slightly angry with me for making so much noise. I was just relieved the spider was gone. My sister came in a few minutes later and I was pretty sure I hit her, but that’s just a guess.

--Cathrina McDonnell