Upwards

The old tree I climbed when I was a kid kept growing, and its branches intermingled with your childhood tree and the trunks wrapped around each other and grew together and grew upward even further past the puffy white imaginary clouds. Up there where it's really high to climb but you can do it if you're not chicken, and up there it meets with the childhood climbing tree of my old friend Peter that was behind his backyard fence and if you balanced just right on the top beam of the fence you could reach the neighbor's yard through it. And the trunk keeps going up and it meets with all the other childhood trees, friends and enemies and eventually even strangers, and the trees that have been cut down still grow here up above the treeline. And you're out of breath but you keep climbing because the great knot of trees all loom upward like Jack's beanstalk, all arcing and combining upward where you'll need a breathing mask and eventually you start to wonder if you'll need a spacesuit and that's when all the trees have merged and you finally get there.

The Mansion.

By that point, your knees are scuffed up bloody from all the climbing and your fingertips are sore and blue from digging into the rough climbable ridges of the bark.

The Mansion is made from a harlequin bric-a-brac of all the treehouses. I thought I saw the trapdoor and broom from my own, but it could have been anyone else's, too. There are signs all over the outside: "NO BOYS ALLOWED" and "PIRATES' CLUB ONLY" and "TREVOR'S HIDEOUT" with the R in Trevor adorably backward, but also signs in French and Japanese and Arabic.

And you look out the lopsided windows of the Mansion, while sipping from a juicebox, and you see the space station out the window, right on your level and you tune your walkie-talkie to talk to the space station and the pilots at the station say: "Unidentified object, please identify yourself, over."

But you're too busy giggling to answer.