By Kathleen Thomas Gaspar
It was sometime around 1980 that I started fretting about the too-skinny branches on lodgepole pines. Such branches could never support a rope that in turn would support a well-worn Goodyear tire – which in turn would support a little boy. Or maybe two little boys.
My fretting continued through at least half that decade, a time when my two sons grew into and then out of the perfect size to make good use of a Goodyear on a rope. And somewhere in the recesses of my 1960s’ counterculture/knee-jerk liberal bellbottomed one-toke-over-the-line hippie mind, which in the ‘80s worsened to a ski resort snobbish-elite/liberal newspaper editor/publisher’s mind, there was guilt.