Wrecking Crew

 When people asked, and they did, how it felt to tear down the Boogle House I told them, "Cathartic." It was the word I could come up with that matched the swirl of emotions I was feeling as my son and I leveled the rotting construction that stood in the corner of our back yard. Used to stand. That stood for almost twenty years. I built it with my own two hands and that is pretty much how it all came tumbling down. Age and ivy had done most of the preliminary work. All it really needed was a good shove. That and a little persuasion from a sledgehammer and a crowbar. 

Why did it have to come down? I suppose it didn't have to. The demolition began after it was suggested that my son, freshly graduated without a job to throw himself at was anxious for something to keep him occupied. "Building a little house," was a notion he and my wife fell upon within hours of his arrival. It should be noted here that my wife has been anxious to see the eyesore razed for some time, but she has been careful of my feelings. She knows how much stock I placed on this caricature of a clubhouse. I had cobbled this monstrosity together with bits and pieces of lumber that had come to us over the initial flurry of house repairs that accompanied our settling into our first house. Initially, it was a shelter for the sandbox we built at the top of the hill to make it possible for our son's truck and tractor enthusiasms at bay. As more pallets arrived and we continued on our seemingly endless parade of home improvement, they became walls and eventually a second story. A ramp was installed in the back for easy access, and the ten foot slide that had once accompanied the tree house I built further down the hill eventually became affixed to the front. 

Somewhere along the line, little touches like a Nerf Gun port on the top was installed, and we dragged home a non-functional video mixing board from the "Mad Scientist Garage Sale" my younger brother tipped us to. There were squirt gun battles and adventures played out for years back there. Until one day, when things outside the back yard held more allure for my son. Eventually, the elements began to take their toll on the insides and outs, and the shed was repurposed to catch rain water with a corrugated roof and a gutter that poured into cisterns placed next to it. The Boogle House was now our watershed. 

As our gray water system began to expand and develop, even that purpose became somewhat unnecessary and the state of disrepair evolved into a state of straight up decay. Vegetation now all but obscured the once proud monument to my son's youth, or his father's imaginings of his youth. When I heard my son and wife suggesting, politely, that maybe it was time for the old girl to come down, I let myself go. 

The pile of rubble my son and I created took only about an hour to generate. As we tore and hammered at the splintering wood, I asked him why it never seemed as interesting to him as it did to me to have a Boogle House. I knew why, of course. It was built from my imagination. It was a box that was intended to be filled with his. He confessed that once when he was out there playing, he had encountered a very large spider, and that was pretty much the end of the fun for him. And that made me feel a little better. That and seeing the debris we had generated. Now the spiders could have it. The wreckage would be hauled away and a new monument would be built. This one from the mind and hands of a trained scenic artist. 

I promised to help him. If he needed it.