Over the weekend of the 15th and 16th, our House of Sticks fell down. To the left is a picture of the House of Sticks in October of 2002. That's me with the tummy. Elizabeth was born a few days later.

I have been putting of writing about this, since it marks sort of the end of an era for me. When Peter was very small, under three as I recall, he wanted me to build him a tree house, but I didn't want to build him a tree house at anything like the usual height because I was afraid he would fall out. At the time I was cleaning up fallen branches in the wooded area of your yard to make the yard more playable.

And I had this great idea: I could use all these nice long sturdy branches to make a groundlevel treehouse, which we called the House of Sticks. I think we began it around June of 2000. It actually took me over a year to construct it, working off and on, and in fact it wasn't just me, but Peter and I, since I let him help put in the decking screws that held it together. Making the walls was easy enough. First I made a pile of sticks all cut to the same length. And then I screwed them to sturdier sticks to frame it.

I briefly contemplated a House of Straw made of straw bales and a House of Brick involving fake brick from the hardware store, but decided that not only was that too much trouble, it also might involve large piles of rotting straw bales, and futher that I was not insane so I should put the thought right out of my head. (I also did not want to get into the kind of straw bale construction that involves protecting the bales from moisture.) One hand-made playhouse was enough.

Our yard is very hilly, which is why I was concerned to make it playable in the first place. And it turned out to be remarkably difficult to find a spot level enough to site the house of sticks without having to do really a lot of site preparation of a kind I didn't want to get into.

Eventually, I settled on an area near the edge of our property line which, while mostly flat, also was one of the wetter areas of the yard. But unless I wanted to something involving pouring concrete, it was the best spot in the yard for the house.  Here I am with the house assembled, but still lacking a roof.

I was all ready to build a roof right away, but I have a Mechanical Engineer for a mother who kept telling me that each proposed design for the roof was going to be too heavy. And so I think it was the spring of 2002 when the House of Sticks finally got its roof. (Most such structures do not have the benefit of an engineering consult.) I ultimately settled on the wooden latice roof you see in the first picture.

Once the roof was up, I planted wisteria next to it with the intention that the wisteria engulf the structure, weaving between the sticks and giving it greater stability. The wisteria had other ideas. It wanted to run up to the weathervane and stay there. Most of the weaving that went on was done by me, not by the uncooperative wisteria.

Here is Elizabeth in the House of Sticks last October, a photo I took with my cellphone camera:

Each winter, the house would sustain some damage, and each spring I would go out with decking screws and a few more sticks to shore things up. The house was made of sticks from the yard, not from commercial lumber, so I knew that ultimately it would rot out and have to be torn down. This past spring, most of the new damage looked unfixable, so I knew that this was probably the last year for the House of Sticks.

So we came home from Washington, DC two weeks ago, where we had celebrated the kids' birthdays with their cousins attended Capclave. The House of Sticks had fallen down in a storm while we were gone:

In a day or so, I'll start tearing it down. But for me it has symbolized what I think is best about my mothering and so it is hard to part with. I have a photo album for it on Flickr, to which I'll add other pictures as I come across them.

Next spring, we'll build something else.