Clubhouses

What does it take to make a clubhouse? Some kids and a little imagination. Sometimes parents help too.

The first clubhouses I remember were the hoghouses. My grandparents had raised hogs many years ago, but now they were just small wooden structures with roofs on them. They had dirt floors and I vaguely remember something boxy enough to sit on. There really wasn’t much to a hoghouse, but it was ours.

My older brother Keith and the neighbor boy Ronnie claimed the biggest one as theirs. Not to be outdone, I got my younger brothers and sister to join me in claiming the smaller one. This was the scene for my famous Backwards Party that I wrote about in an earlier post. We cleaned out all the spider webs and bugs and climbed in through the door in the roof that opened and closed.

My memory of the hoghouses seems fleeting. I believe my father may have removed them shortly after we moved onto the farm. Whatever the reason, we were soon looking at other clubhouse options.

There was an old apple orchard my grandfather had planted beside our house. The apple trees were very large compared to the ones seen in apple orchards today, and we didn’t go to the expense of spraying them to get a harvest. We simply ate and canned what we wanted from them. Keith and Ronnie built (or perhaps my older cousins built it years earlier before we moved onto the farm) a treehouse high up in one of the apple trees. I was afraid to try to climb up the tree trunk even with those boards nailed on like a ladder, so it wasn’t hard for them to keep us out. But we fussed that we wanted a tree house too. So Dad built a platform on a low branch on a smaller apple tree for the rest of us. It had a ladder that you could climb up to one corner. Our treehouse made a pretty good clubhouse until “big boy” (son of one of the farm hands) fell off the ladder and broke his arm.

I think the most unique clubhouses were the ones in the wheat fields. Again, Keith and Ronnie set the pace with the first one. They discovered a large patch of weeds growing in a low spot in the wheat field and made it into a clubhouse by tramping down the weeds in the center of the patch while leaving the outside weeds standing for the walls. When they turned me away from their clubhouse, I looked for my own patch of weeds and recruited my younger sibblings to help make a clubhouse of our own.

I’m not sure what the point of having a clubhouse was. Maybe there is a sense of power that comes from having a spot to call your own. That’s one of the nice things about living on a farm. You can find your get-away spots if you call them clubhouses or not, like climbing up in the haymow all by myself and playing with the kittens, or sitting on my favorite tree limb in the tree at the far edge of the orchard and just thinking about things and spying on the world of birds and stick-worm caterpillars and wheat blowing in the breeze across the field.

Copyright © 2009 by Janice D. Green