Hiding From Adulthood- A Nonfic Essay

  Hiding from Adulthood

It seems as if every child’s favorite place is wherever they can find the most comfort. It’s always like a secret hiding place. Wherever a child can find a place that's all their own. To hold all their secrets. 

When I was younger, I had two places like this. At my mom’s house, I was a lonely only child. Luckily for me, I had a tight-knit connection with my parents. My mom was, and still is, the most loving woman on the face of the earth, and my stepdad was, as he would say “a kid that never grew up”. So, even though I didn’t have siblings to play with, he was always around to do whatever I was interested in. Our specialty was legos. He built my favorite place with me. In the town house we lived in at the time, there was a cubby beneath the stairs. Together we built a fort of pillows and blankets in that nook. After school, we would watch movies together on our portable DVD player in the fort. My favorites were Barbie Fairytopia and Cheaper by the Dozen. 

The second place of mine was at my dad’s house. I shared this place too. I didn’t like to be alone. My sister and I shared a room, it was smaller than a typical college dorm. This room of ours was far too small to be our favorite place. Instead we were always outside. Our front yard had a very large magnolia tree in our front yard. It was one of those trees that had thick, low swooping branches, the kind ideal for climbing. Fittingly, we called this tree our “climbing tree.” We would spend most of the day in the summer, or our time after school, hanging from the limbs of this tree, hiding in the leaves from our older brother, and the real world. I would climb all the way to the top and then scream and cry because I was too scared to come down. My sister would throw fits when she saw spiders or other bugs, and I would kill them. This place became our own little world of imagination. Some days there were goblins after us, other days we were cave people, but in any case we always had each other and our tree. 

When we were older, the largest tree in our backyard was cut down. Our parents were scared it would fall on the house if a storm came through. My dad took it upon himself to design and build a treehouse on the stump for us. He’s an engineer, so this was in his wheelhouse. Of course, I was his assistant in building it. I hated it. The heat, the boredom. What’s a Phillips head screwdriver? Despite the terrible experience of being forced to help build the tree house, once it was fully assembled it was awesome. There was of course a slide and a ladder, but there was also a rock wall (with real rocks), a dutch door, four windows and one extra large window (all of them opened and latched), a trap door and ladder built into the stump of the tree, and a bucket and pulley system. When it was finished, my sister and I got to paint it ourselves. Her side was electric blue and mine was hot pink. Part of the floor was also hot pink where I had spilled my paint. We added floor mats, a table and chairs, and a chalkboard. From that point on, we spent every spare moment in that tree house. The tree house became our pretend school, our dance studio, and our film set. I remember staying out there for entire days. We slept out there in the summers and collected bugs in jars. I remember one really rainy day, we packed up our rain coats, umbrellas, and barbie dolls and headed out for the day. We texted my stepmom on our very first ipod touch and asked her to bring us lunch. She braved the pouring rain to bring us ham sandwiches. We didn’t leave until we were called in for supper. 

I think the special thing about these places we remember from our childhood is that the older we get, the less and less of places like these we get. We surround ourselves with school, then work, then families of our own and we forget the importance of this time we have to ourselves. We forget these special places where we once took refuge.