I Got High This Weekend

Calm down.  My righteous standard hasn’t degraded.  I didn’t do reefer.  It was a natural high.

My whole family got high this weekend.

Last night, we stayed in a tree house.

Now that I’ve got your attention…

My father has a great lawyer friend who is pretty much done with practicing law but owns an enterprise named Honey Rock, a woodworking shop.  He lives in a rural area of Louisiana about 45 minutes west of where I live.  Mr. Stuart McClendon and his wife, Lillian, are “elderly,” but only in name.  Mr. Stuart often displays more energy than that of a young child on caffeine...and the wisdom of a sage.  He actively continues building various types of wooden furniture…and his greatest achievement woodwise, as far as I know, is a tree house built on his property.

We’re not talking your childhood plank of wood nailed on top of several oak tree branches a couple steps from the ground.  We’re talking a literal HOUSE that’s at least 25 feet off the ground.

We arrived at the McClendon’s at dusk to their sprawling, beautiful, multi-acre property with blueberry groves, thick forested areas, and a picturesque house with a beckoning veranda.  We walk in.  My siblings and I play ping-pong upstairs while the steaks are on the grill.  After that, it’s dining with fine china, some of the plates 100 years old.  We chat with these two wonderful people who are not only tremendous servants but also passionate about Truth.  They send us off to bed for the night…

And there it just out into the night sky.  We drive through the blueberry orchard to the foot of the house, barely visible in the dark, because trees growing around it cover the structure with their lush vegetation.  We have to duck underneath some hanging bush branches and are greeted by a winding staircase that leads to the top.  But before we ascend, we note that when we unload our luggage in a few minutes, there is a contraption on the ground floor that can hoist our luggage from the ground by the operation of a lever at the top.  As we climb to the top, the sound of crickets chirping fills our ears…and there we are at the top.  Over 25 feet above the ground, with a view of the sky and some overhanging branches.  The porch on top has a barbecue grill and two porch springs constructed at Honey Rock, Mr. McClendon’s woodshop about 1/8 mile away.

And there it is.  It’s like someone stuck a small, two-story house on top of a huge mass of interlocking pieces of wood.  And it’s rather sturdy, although it rocks a little bit.  Walking in, there is a small living room, a kitchenette table set, a queen-sized bed in the corner, a kitchen, a bathroom with a shower…

…as lights come on to reveal a very homely home far above the ground floor…

I ascend the stairs to find three small “bedrooms.”  They’re each really the size of a walk-in closet, with a small cot, a small chest of drawers, and just enough room to stand.  A curtain separates each private bunk from the upstairs walkway.  The view from the windows upstairs are great.

At this point, as I walk downstairs, I realize, this is really one of those lifetime experiences.  “OK.  I’m going to spend the night sleeping in a tree house, a two-story mini-HOUSE in the air.”

It all starts to sink in.  This place has air conditioning, well water, all the comforts and amenities of any suburban American home…and everything is wood.  Beautiful wood…not rustic or rough, the kind you’d get splinters from.  But imagine the wood of a porch swing on display at the front of a furniture store.  The kind that’s smooth and flawless.  The whole house seems to be made of this type of wood.  And from the wood to the draperies to the furniture…

…the environment is one that makes you just collapse into the nearest chair and think out loud, “Now this is the life.”

Of course, we had to go back downstairs.  Not that we didn’t want to.  We got to load the luggage onto the box contraption and then go back up to operate a wire-machine thing that pulls it up for easy unloading.

You may wonder, “What did you do for the remainder of the evening?”  What else do you want us to do?  But relax of course!  It’s like your own private Swiss Family Robinson experience.  I played a little checkers and watched a couple minutes of The Gospel of John, but what else can you do…or would you want to do, but just sit out on the porch swing and be looking down on the rest of the world…

Anyhow, “bedtime” did come.  I took the opportunity in my cot upstairs, by lamplight, to read the liner notes as I listened to a new CD.  That was done about 12:20 A.M.

Apparently, my body wasn’t ready for sleep yet though.  I discovered that my little room, adjacent to my brother (Matt), was joined by a gap in the wall.  There was a little space big enough to allow objects to be passed (or thrown) from my room to his or vice versa…

It was fun to hear his “aah!” when my orange t-shirt came sailing over.  After that went back and forth and the snickering had settled down for fear of awaking the parents…I tried throwing a pair of underwear over the partition to his side.  (They were clean, ok?) 

Eventually, all kind of stuff was flying, I emptied my booksack out and tossed a load of laundry at the dude.  He played me though and threw my shirt downstairs.  I had to sneak downstairs without waking anyone to retrieve it.

What it came down to is that neither of us could sleep…so eventually that little gap between the top of the partition and the ceiling saw not only clothing…but also paper airplanes and even a conversation passed through it.  I listened to all the music I wanted until I was tired of tunes…

…everyone else was asleep.  And still I tossed and turned.  My throat hurt and spit kept accumulating in my throat making me choke, as I coughed (*yuck*).  I kept feeling like I might vomit.  Okay, I’ll stop with the details…

Push comes to shove, I slept 3 hours at most.  I was not a happy camper when I woke up.

But when I wandered downstairs there was a campfire going, with bacon eggs and grits being cooked in a skillet.  That’ll get anybody’s day going, even people on not much sleep.  Furthermore, those 2 cups of coffee helped…and the extra cayenne pepper and spike seasoning on the eggs was “wick-ed.”

After a fireside breakfast (put on by our hosts), something of interest caught my eye.  Matt had been given permission to drive the little golf cart around…

…soon I was cruising all around his Mr. McClendon's property on the cart.  I’ll tell you I find driving golf carts around rural acreage is more fun that highway auto driving.  Except some of the trails I took gave me a bad run-in with low-lying vegetation, namely thorn bushes.

Later on, we hitched a ride on a stripped-down pickup truck bearing a canoe and us in the cargo area down to the pond.

Matt, Hannah and I set sail in the canoe.  Now, if you’re a regular “Life and Times of Joshua Clayton” blog reader, you know I went on a P4P retreat last week and ventured on a body of water with no oars.  This time, friends, we had oars, and things went a lot easier.  We rowed around a few times and eventually landed at an island in the middle for some fishing.  Only caught one fish (and Matt caught it)…but it was fun.

After we were tired of the sun sizzling our skin, we headed back to the treehouse for some A/C and some lunch…

…followed by watermelon out on the porch.

Leaving was hard that evening, especially because it was straight from paradise to a meeting at work to get chewed out for not following procedures.  But such is life.  Suck it up.

I got home to a couple of nice mail items, including some money from my grandparents and…a DVD with Project Graduation on it (video footage of a class party on the night of my graduation).  It should be pretty funny.  It was clean fun…no alcohol or anything, put on my parents to provide games and prizes and food and stuff for kids on graduation nite.

This weekend with my family felt a bit melancholy as my time is running out till I’m in the brave new world at LSU.  This was probably my last “retreat” type outing with them.  Ok, let’s not boohoo or get sentimental yet.  We’ll have enough of that when they drive away on August 18th.

God is very good though.  I had an encouraging talk with my pastor’s wife Sunday.  I don’t know what I was ever thinking….being discouraged.  God is for me, not against me.  This summer has been … probably … the weirdest one ever.  For most kids who go off to college, they’re hell-bent on getting out of their parents’ house and hell-raising once they get there…but with kind loving Christian parents, it’s not like that.  Our family is very strong and we love each other to death.  Not to say I haven’t been frustrated for the past year or so with my parents over points of conflict that arise at this age…and yes I can’t wait to spread my wings and fly on my own…but the mix of emotions is rather odd at times.

I’m in the stage of saying goodbyes to the old and staring a bit hesitantly at the new.  I’m going to spend the night at my grandparents’ house for (perhaps) the last time next week.

But, on a different note…

Mr. McClendon said I could take a few buds and spend the night in the tree house when we come back from LSU.  And I was thinking of a different use…

…my future wife, whoever she may be, may find the place a romantic retreat on wedding night…I know I would.

“Josh, calm down kiddo.  You’ve still got a little wait yet.”

But just imagine!  Ah.  It would be such a challenge carrying the bride up a staircase…we could say we spent our first night together in a treehouse…have a campfire breakfast…

Josh