Sunnyslope walls of knotty pine
Little red house full of love divine
Always bursting at the seams
With leaves and trees and summer breeze
Brightest eyes and lightest wings
Jeans with rips and skinned up knees
Bittersweet water grows and flows
Down the center of the football rows
Hopscotch, chalk and popsicle sticks
Sappy woods of fir and twigs
Longest days and deepest nights
Climbing to the highest heights
Lost treasures, adventures untold
Toys found, traded and sold
Butting heads, dares and fears
Wrestling, fighting, smiles and tears
Bicycles flying, speeding racing
Learning and growing, always chasing
Screened in back porch and bricks behold
Cool stone slabs, our hearts would hold
Neverland sweet, Summerland bright
Wonderland wild and Childhood right
The big tree stands in his corner alone
Offers a hideout, a big hidden home
The sky was bigger, grass taller
Concrete harder and worries smaller
The dust and dirt between our toes
Were rings and diamonds, everyone knows
The story scars, our glory stars
In the summer sky above our home
The leaf piles deep and fireflies light
The moon in our eyes, always bright
The roof was hot and burned your feet
those feet that ran along the street
Slap em down hard, run as fast as you can
Blood and cuts don’t matter, we ran and ran
Underneath bushes and up in the trees
The wind always whispered, to you and to me
Mint green berries and Indian clay
The warriors would live to the end of the day
Walnut warpaint, living on the path
For this we were punished with a bath
We’d all go meet at the broken fence
And talk about what had happened since
We had played the very night before
Till mothers called us through the door
In mornings Tarzan calls would ring
Throughout the yards the kids would sing
Leaping the fence lines over the sand
Our world stretches on, your land is our land
Night or day, hot or cold
You’d find lost boys always digging for gold
Sailing on ships of brown and green
Trees are boats if your eyes can see
Plywood made our tree house floor
No walls or ceiling, no front door
The metal ladder led to the throne
Of open freedom, pure windblown
Kings and queens, servants and slaves
Wendy and Peter and Cherokee braves
Cowboys and Indians, fighting and war
Underground tunnels of cap guns galore
Jumping right down from the highest tree
Broken bones and scrapes but you’re still the king
Catching rain water falls in pots
Savoring rain when the ground was hot
Black diamonds found in
gravel gray
Living in the ditch till the end of the day
With stars in our eyes and flowers in our hair
We’d fly till we’re breathless, without a care
Roasted peanuts and fireman’s spray
Doused us at the bike parade
Before the iris would awake
We’d catch it in the ditch and take
The smooth and cool on your lips
Heaven painted purple drips
Following wood down the ditch of a river
When the sky overflowed and we’d laugh and shiver
Plotting to catch those birds of gold
With blue wooden boxes that would never hold
Hound dogs and snow dogs roaming the block
While our neighborhood family together would walk
Little runaways with bandannas of food
Never got far, always back by noon
Sunlight, stardust moon gleaming night
Barefoot German spotlight flight
Cops and robbers, hide and seek
Trap door tree house down the street
A gazebo, a castle it’s all the same
Gumballs and tire swings, much more than a game
Water balloons and painted faces
Friendship bread and wheel barrow races
On the side yard tree we’d walk the line
We’d all get on and we’d all fit fine
Milk glass, China glass tornado ruins and bone
Another world, another place we’d been carefully shown
We’d sit in the grass and learn and listen
In our history class as the sun would glisten
Reading of knights and Egyptian lands
Presidents, paintings and sign language hands
Under the trees with our sisters and brothers
And so many mothers, loving each other
We’d act out stories , pirates turtles and birds
Peterkin papers and angelic words
Surfing the pavement in red wagon fly
Only grabbing our helmets if cops would come by
Our mailman called Cowboy, our ice cream man friend
We never imagined the story would end
Pit bulls and pistols and fireman dads
Crime scenes and fires were the latest fads
Our carpet was violets, of purple and blue
Together we live and together we grew
On Sunnyslope road were these tales of gold,
There is no such thing as growing old
