speaking of temporary shelters

speaking of temporary shelters

fiction
edward w pritchard

A girl from my neighborhood once told my wife at the time that I ran wild as a boy. It was an
inappropriate but true thing to say for since I was four years old I often roamed the neighborhoods
unsupervised and as uncivilized as Tom Sawyer or Huck Finn.

Once a friend and I were across the canal in the woods when we found a large old uprooted hollow tree stump with ice on it's floor one June day. The next day my friend couldn't return to our temporary shelter as he had contacted vegetation rash from the hollow tree. So I used the hollow tree as my cave house, scrapped some of the ice off the walls to chill my seven up drink and had several adventures
throughout that summer with the old tree stump as a back drop.

A few years later I and some older guys hid out in the sticker filled gullies behind our grade school waiting for the workmen at the new apartments on the lake to leave after they finished installing about a hundred washers, dryers refrigerators and stoves. Patiently we waited to commandeer the boxes. Over the next few days we broke down the boxes and rearranged the packing crates to make a box city there in the swamp along the lake behind the new apartments. The central area of the box city floated precariously on the swamp and could only be reached by crawling through a very long tunnel of boxes to reach the living room which looked out on the lake. I was the last of the boys to leave the sight and the workmen threatened to call my dad the day they started to burn our settlement. My Dad heard about what happened with the box city and me trespassing  but I didn't get in trouble because before my Dad was a soldier or worked as a rate clerk in the trucking industry when he was twelve my Father had played Tom Sawyer in the school play and got to kiss Becky Thatcher in the cave in the Mark Twain story.

My last temporary shelter was a downtown apartment near the University where I met a girl I liked.
After that I was married and had four children who I tried to supervise closely so they wouldn't grow up to be wild or vagabonds.