Our house sat on several acres, most of which was woods that stretched out down the hill from the barn. One year, my father got it in his head that we needed a screened-in room down in the woods. I don’t know where he got the idea or what he’d envisioned using it for, but it was a great family DIY project and resulted in many years of fun.
Standing in the back section of the barn, you could slide open the access door to look down into the woods below. Straight ahead was a flat area at the crest of the drop into the woods that was chosen for the location of what we called “The Screenhouse”. My brothers got to help my father build it, (as they were males and needed to know about such things more than girls in those days.)
The screens kept out the marauding mosquitoes if you were careful about keeping the door closed. The floor was raised a little off the ground and if I remember right was made of 2×4’s painted in gray enamel. The slanted roof was made of corrugated metal sheets. Down the hill on one side was the “firebowl” where we held hot dog roasting parties and sang by the light of the campfire. Down the other two sides the woods sloped sharply towards McCoy’s Creek and the big factory that supported the income of much of the town.
All of us kids got plenty of turns holding sleepovers in the screenhouse. We owned a set of four green cotton sleeping bags lined with flannel hunting scenes. These would get hauled down to the screenhouse with pillows, snacks, and flashlights and led to wonderful adventurous nights in the woods. A couple doors down the street was the American Legion Hall, where there were weekend parties in the summer that generated loud music and voices. These could be a bit spooky to kids alone in the woods, but gave us reasons to complain about the neighbors.
If you couldn’t hold it, you’d be forced to crawl out of your sleeping bag and walk carefully by flashlight beam up the hill to the house and back. Pretty scary for a young kid alone in the dark woods. Some of my friends were too scared and we’d have to pack up and go sleep the rest of the night in the house.
The screen walls were a metal mesh and rusted over time so that a careless bump would tear a hole and let the bugs in. This had to be repaired by hand, cutting shapes in fresh screen and fitting the cut edges around the rip in the old screen and turning them over to secure the patch. It was kind of a fun chore, although the patchwork looked pretty sad after years of repairs.
Sometimes I’d go use the screenhouse as my own private practice room to work on my french horn exercises. It still required lots of hauling of equipment, but if it wasn’t going to rain for a while I could leave things down there for a few days at a time and it was a nice retreat. It also worked well for studying for finals with no interruptions.
In my senior year of high school, my best friends all slept out. The drinking age had recently been dropped to 18 and we got permission to bring a couple beers with us. We really did not like it but it seemed to be a rite of passage we should take. Two of my girl friends, on a dare, “streaked” across the main street in the dark. Streaking was all the rage at the time, and involved running, nude, in a public place. They were only partially nude, and there was no one around at that time of night, but it became part of our unforgettable friendship lore.
I wonder sometimes, what my father had imagined when he decided to create this house in the woods. What he created was a wonderful playhouse full of memories for his children.
Memoirs 