THE SWINGING TREE

As children growing up in the town's woods of Ashland, Massachusetts we would sometimes select young trees that were perhaps fifteen or twenty feet tall and climb near the top. The trees selected would be vertical poles with no forks in their trunk. To climb to the top we would have to shimmy up by wedging one foot against the other by our weight, and hand over hand pulling our bodies up until we reached a part of the main trunk where one would surely say that the stick supporting us could no longer do so.
The tree would start to yield by our weight sometimes to the left and sometimes to the right we would sway like a big pendulum. The trick at this point was when swaying departure became furthest from the vertical to release the grip by our feet and holding on with our hands arch the trunk by our mass so that it would bend and lower our stretched out bodies to the ground. At which point when we let go the truck would spring back to the upright vertical with a snap of the whip. Monkeys were we.
One of us learnt the hard way that this feat should only be attempted during the spring or summer months when the sap was flowing through the wood and such plants were flexible and pliant. Winter months the wood is brittle for lack of this vegetation's life blood. My friend, whose name was also Peter, tried this on a wintery day when the snow drifted throughout the woods and the limbs were leafless. The trunk snapped in half and he was left winded in the snow.
I have many such memories of these days of my youth. Carefree and wild were we. These are my favorite painting subjects, purely painted off of memory and immortalized on board or canvas.
The Swinging Tree - be it spruce, birch, maple, or oak