When Grandma Was A Little Girl - #8

Story #8 - The Tree House and I nearly lost my finger!
Have you ever played in a tree house?

We didn’t have any huge trees on our property where I grew up. So, my dad decided to build a “Crows’ Nest.” You might wonder just exactly what a Crows’ Nest is. It’s a tree house built on top of a telephone pole. The term Crows Next comes from a ship where there is a lookout on the main mast and the sailors could look out and see across the water and look out for other ships or find land on the horizon.

My dad got a telephone pole and dug a hole and set it in concrete. It was very stable. I can’t remember exactly how tall the pole was. When you are 7 or 8 years old it probably looked 15 feet tall! It probably was only about 10 feet tall. My dad built a tree house. It had four walls and I think it had two open windows. The windows were just famed in and left open. The tree house was probably about 5-feet square and 5-feet tall. He built the floor first and then the walls and roof. He cut a trap door in the floor so we could go in and out of it. It had a rope we had to climb up into it. I remember my two older brothers Geoffrey and Douglas could climb that rope pretty quick. I think my twin brother Gayle did too. I had a little harder time climbing in and out. My dad put a few pole rungs in the pole so I could climb part way. I remember it being so much fun to be up in the Crows Nest! We could see everywhere! It was so cool! The rope was about 1-inch thick. We had a knot tied at the bottom and would put a piece of 2-inch pipe that was about 18-inches long through the knothole. It was about 3 feet above the ground. We would swing and it was fun!

One day I was swinging on the pipe swing. My mom called us in for dinner. My mom did not like us being late for dinner. When my dad came home he expected dinner on the table at 5:00p.m. So I decided I would hang upside and drop from the pipe onto the ground and that’s what I did. What I didn’t count on was the pipe slipping 'out of the rope knot' and falling to the ground. I remember vividly letting go of the rope and hanging from my knees upside down and letting my hands fall to the ground and then my feet. “OUCH!” I remember my hands were on the ground and the next second the pipe crashed down on top of my finger. It was my ring finger on my left hand, the one where you wear a wedding band. I thought my finger was cut off! My finger was bleeding. The bone was showing and I screamed and cried and ran into the house. The cut was just above the middle knuckle on my finger. My mom looked at it and cleaned it up and rushed me down to the clinic. I had not cut off my finger. But when you think about it, there is only a little bit of skin covering your fingers so there is not much protection covering the bone in your fingers.

I was pretty lucky my finger wasn’t broken or cut off. The cut was about 1-inch long. I remember getting a shot to numb my finger and feeling the vibration of the needle going in and out sewing the cut closed. I didn’t watch the doc sew it up. He put a bandage on it and we went home. I remember it throbbed when the numbness wore off. I had to wear my finger bandaged for a while. It didn’t keep me from playing though! I still have the scar today and I do remember how it got it!