The crab apple tree in front of our Williams Street house wasn’t imposing or even all that old, but it was perfect to climb and hide in.

Actually, I wasn’t all that hidden when sitting there, but most people didn’t look up to peer for children amongst the branches.

I clocked a lot of hours in that tree.

Williams was a dead-end street so there wasn’t much to see other than the occasions when the neighbor’s teenager would climb onto their roof and play his trumpet.  Weird kid. Bad trumpet player, but I suppose he should get credit for practicing.

I’m sure that I dragged a book up there with me now and again, but I don’t remember reading in the tree.  Of course, I read everywhere.  I read like most people breathe – everywhere all the time. 

I was older—12, 13, 14 – on the cusp – living my life, but also waiting for it to begin.

I do remember one vivid day at 14 when I waited for my boyfriend while sitting in the tree and there he came, bepopping down the middle of Williams, carrying the largest heart-shaped box of candy I’d ever seen.  Whitman’s.  It was Valentine’s Day – a special occasion.  I usually did my tree-sitting in the summer.

I liked being in the tree. I felt hidden and the configuration of the branches made climbing easy.  The trunk and major limb were in such a position as to make reclining in the tree very comfortable for my lithe teenage self.

One summer I took to making caftans out of old sheets.  I’d waft around in yards of white percale dragging behind me and eventually climb the tree –no mean feat in an oversized sheet and sit there pondering the universe. Feeling spiritual and Egyptian in my badly sewn caftan.

Kenny-the-roof-trumpeter had nothing on me in the weirdness department. 

I do remember dragging bags of Doritos into the tree with me. I carried the bag in my clenched teeth reserving both hands to scramble up the tree.  Doritos were the new snack and took the country by storm.  There were two flavors – plain and taco.  I loved the taco ones and considered the bag a single serving.  I was always hungry in those days. A bottomless pit of hunger and volatile hormones.

I’d wipe my orange-stained fingers on my caftan when done. 

So, there I was, a long gangly teenager in a bedsheet streaked with orange stains perched in a tree going through puberty one long summer day at a time.