Since my parents moved to Melbourne, their old property in the suburbs has just been sitting there unoccupied. Every now and then one of them will drive past to see if there’s any stray mail and they might do a bit of gardening. Recently, I went back myself to see if the place had any potential as a rental investment. I hadn’t been back properly since I was a teenager so it had been a good fifteen or twenty years.
I wandered around the property checking the outside of the house and assessing how much the renovations would cost. Then I noticed that the back of the house was lopsided. Turns out the roots from one of the big trees was causing the damage and I was going to have to call for arborists near Melbourne. I looked up and found the tree that would have to be removed. That’s when a torrent of memories came gushing back.
High up in the branches were the remains of an old wooden tree house my sister and I had built. Our dad helped us of course but we did a lot of work for a couple of kids, including drawing up designs and dragging logs from the woods. We spend a lot of time playing in that tree, climbing on it and my sister even once broke her arm falling off. But we loved it like it was another sibling.
After all the memories came back I started to hesitate to call for Melbourne tree felling. But unfortunately it had to be done if I wanted to lease the property. I took a photo of the dilapidated treehouse to show my sister and thought I’d look through some old albums to find pictures from when we built it. Maybe I’ll come back and say one last goodbye before the arborists came around for the tree removal.