230314 North Woods

This picture is the closest I could find that resembled the house at the edge of North Woods.

When I was a mere lad, I could walk up one block from our home and there was an old Victorian style house that no one lived in. The house was at the edge of North woods. Summertime mom would feed me breakfast and then I was off to North woods. I would spend all day roaming in the woods. Sometimes there were other kids there and we would run about having a good time. I had a good time there climbing trees or looking for arrowheads. There were still some to be found back then.

At the far edge of the woods, there was a steep drop off all around the edges. It was manageable getting down or climbing back up on my way home. That is all but one section of it called soapstone hill. No one could climb that ridge. What we called soapstone was kind of a damp,slippery clay and the 30 or so feet of it was impossible to climb. We would have competitions to see who could get the farthest up the hill before sliding back down to the edge of a creek that ran through the woods. It was a shallow creek, but great to wash off most of the soapstone. By the time I got back home I was reasonably dry. I could lay down [n thr stream and the creek would flow past me. A few times I drank the water in it. Mom usually made me a peanut butter sandwich and a small canteen of water, by lunch time the peanut butter was dried out and I had drank the canteen water, so the creek water was all I had to drink.

At another edge of the woods was the Price family home. There was a huge oak tree about 20 feet away from their home. The large lower branches of the tree made an excellent place for a tire swing suspended from a thick rope. The tire was hung about 6 feet from the edge of where the ground dropped away. It had a smaller rope that allowed us to pull the tire back up over land, climb in and swing out far over the small cliff. It was a near heart stopper the first few times we did it. We seemed to relish dangerous and scary things. It always did get my adrenaline flowing. Jane Price was in my grade school classes and I used to carry her books and walk her home. Later when we were early teens we went to teen dance night in the basement of the school. I was never a good dancer, but Jane was.

By the time I was 10 years old, developers started cutting down trees and removing earth from my beloved North woods to build houses there. The first thing they did was pour concrete foundations for basements. The foundations were about 10 inches wide and after the construction crews were gone I would walk the tops of the foundations, imagining I was performing in a circus or something to that effect. Once the wooden frames started going up, that was the end of an era for me. I never went back to the little bit of woods or down by the construction area.

Not long after that door closed, another door opened when my dad and grandpa acquired the clubhouse. I wrote about that in the “Hidden Lake” post of March 9, 2023. I suppose that everyone has situations in life when one door closes, another door opens. That has been the story of my life, although I must admit the new door opening was not always what I expected or wanted. The worst door closed with Joyce’s passing, the new door opening has led to a very different life.