The Treehouse

I had to leave the house. All those boxes, packing away all my things. Packing away my life. We were moving. I still had a hard time believing it. How is it fair that my mother wanted to live closer to her sister, and so we had to move? What about my wants? My dreams? I'd lived here my whole life. My little siblings, the twins, were born here. I had friends here. We'd built a tree house and had picnics and gone swimming. We'd planned out our futures. I had a girlfriend. Why didn't these things matter to my parents? Why couldn't they see how much they were hurting me?

I wandered out into the huge field near my house. In the middle of it was the large oak tree that my friends and I had built our tree house in. I approached it and stared up at the old, mismatched wood of the tree house. I remembered biking around the town with my friends, looking for scrap pieces of wood we could take. I hadn't been to the tree house in years, but I still remembered ever inch of its appearance. I grabbed a plank of worn wood with my hands. It was the first rung to the ladder we had nailed into the side of the tree. I took a deep breath and began to climb. I instinctively let my hands skip over the fourth rung – it had always been notorious for giving terrible splinters. Soon, I had pulled my self through the hole in the floor of the tree house.

The only thing in the small wooden house was a little bedside table that John had donated to the cause. His parents had been planning on throwing it away anyway. I remember Mike's dad coming to help us lug the thing into the house. It had been years ago, but I remember it as if it were yesterday. I opened the drawer of the little table. Inside were some old comic books and some pieces of paper with writing on them. Underneath those, was the flag.

I pulled the flag out from under the papers. It was the flag of our nation, but not our real one. We had played games where the field and the woods behind them were our own land, and we had been explorers. The flag was an old scrap of bed cloth that we had coloured on to create our nation's flag. I smiled as I got an idea.

I walked over to the window and reached for the thin rope I know would be hanging there. My fingers found it, and I tied the flag to it. Then I pulled on another rope, and hoisted the flag to the top of the flagpole.

I stared at the ground and could see the shadow of the tree, and the huge dark square that was the shadow of the tee house. High above that I could see the shadow of the flag, fluttering in the wind.