When I was a kid I had a mostly typical suburban childhood.

White picket fences, cracker box houses all the same, endless concrete for my friends and

I to ride our bikes on and the only strangers we saw with the occasional drifter or traveler that wandered through our town.

My dad worked at the steel mill, my mom was a homemaker, and I remember afternoons off from school, filled with bike rides, trips to the arcade, Boy Scout

meetings, and, of course, exploring Stokes Woods that lay just of the secluded neighborhoods

we all lived in.

Stokes Woods was where my friends and I had so many first.

It was the first bit of real freedom we had, spending summer days exploring, making

maps and setting up camps that would be found again later to our great amusement.

It was our first brush with death, finding birds or animal carcasses on the trail.

We poked them with sticks and ooed. Never guessing that one day we might share their fate. I was in the woods the first time I swore, yelling,

damn it, as I skinned my knee when I was 8.

I was in the woods the first time I saw a naked woman.

The glossy pages of Terry's dad's playboy held gripped in my sweaty hand

as we sat around a campfire when I was 11.

It hosted my first camping trip and was the first place I was allowed to camp alone.

Well, with Terry and Reggie at least.

It was also where we found the tree house.

The tree house was a relic of kids gone by.

It was in a big old tree set into a clearing, a fire pit dug in its shadow, with a

unweighted to pull things up and a rope ladder to climb up through the trapdoor.

It had been built in pieces and there was a wall inside with the signatures of

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