SAGE ADVICE: Itching for a clubhouse

There’s an old-timey kaleidoscope with its business end broken by a Christmas hammer. There’s a birthday bug collecting box. A single sock, for some reason. Scraps of wood, thin little pieces that came from the cutting of bigger scraps of wood Sunday. And there’s the horseshoe, scrounged from somewhere, hanging from a tree branch. There isn’t any poison ivy. I tore it all down Tuesday night after a slight rash appeared on nearly every one in the family. It was the first bout for all of us, I think. After years of pulling the stuff up barehanded, I finally hit my limit when the juice from some severed section of ivy plant dripped onto my exposed skin. Go figure.
We spent Sunday afternoon building a tree house. I guess you’d call it that. It’s all of one foot off the ground, but it is in a stand of trees. My elementary school age sons call it a clubhouse. I wanted to name it Chaos, in honor of the clubhouse I had in the old, snake-infested corncrib back when I was an elementary school age son myself. My wife wanted a name less likely to get them involved with a bad element as elementary school age cedes to middle school age, as it does. 
I don’t know what name they’ve settled on. Maybe it will be a hybrid, like Chaos and Blue Skies. I’ll find out when we get the walls done and we hang the horseshoe above the door.
So far the clubhouse has the aforementioned detritus, a scrap-wood floor and a porch swing turned clubhouse couch. And the end table they stole from the porch when no one was looking. And a box of Teddy Grahams of questionable quality, freshness and insect-free-ness. And, of course, them. They’ve spent hours in there since the floor was nailed down. If you don’t hear them or see them, figure they’re in the garden hoeing out all that pesky, invasive spinach or hanging out in the clubhouse, fighting over who is and isn’t allowed inside.
Here’s what I hope. I hope they make it their own, in the same way I made that Chaos spot my own. It was a place where my parents didn’t tread. They didn’t know what it was I was doing in there (a lot of sitting on the rescued – read pulled from snake-infested weeds – car seats eating from boxes of Cheerios of questionable quality). Most of the time, I’m sure, they didn’t even know where I was. Since we now live in an age that fears if a child sees a butterfly’s wings without a responsible adult within arm’s length, some trench-coated ne’er-do-well just might steal them and sell them on the Internet or some such, this even as we force feed Disney’s oh so very unwholesome concept of childhood (as in this Hannah Montana ain’t your mother’s “Snow White”) that gives away their innocence as a way-too-young age, I know where my kids are. They’re sitting on the porch swing that was nailed into the tree, eating from the suspect box of Teddy Grahams. But they think I can’t see them, and that’s what matters any way, that they get some time away from performing for a grown up and get to be a kid in the same way that I got to be a kid and from time to time still do.