Last night in the Asperger’s Support Group a mother recounted a tale of her son’s daredevil activities and I had to chuckle to myself because it sounded so similar to my attempt to touch the sky.
I was probably 5 in Wilmington, NC. It’s a quaint little oceanside town of 60,000. Good people. Our house was a one story house with a nice sized front and backyard. The front yard had a huge Magnolia tree with one branch that had a horizontally split in it. My brother and I could put the handgranade shaped seed pods into the split and move the branch to make it devour the cone. We called it The Alligator.
I have always been a climber. Wouldn’t stay in my crib. Climbed down the side of Grandfather Mountain. No tree could stop me. No precipice could frighten me.
One day between the ages of 3 and 6 I took it upon myself to “touch the sky.” I climbed that magnolia tree until my little head popped out of the top. The branches must have barely been supporting me. Fortunately a sharp tone from my mother brought me back down. The story from the support group told of the child demanding that his mother rent a crane to get him out of his tree! (She talked him down)
