At my grandparents' house on a wonderful, warm and sunny day with  the smell of rain remaining from the night before. Most of the day we had been inside engaging in various games on the Wii. After a while we ran out of Wii games, so we went to find games to play outside. We put our shoes on and rushed out the front door like race cars on a track into the damp grass in front of the house.  

Almost immediately, Justin spoke up saying, “I’m going to climb that tree,” and pointed at a rubbery rust colored tree not too far from us. Silence pierced the air as we all turned to look at the kiwi green tree and thought over what he had just said. This tree specifically only had a single low branch, and after about four feet of going up, the tree breaks into two separate parts, making it much harder to climb at the start. It was split right down the center.

After thinking for a couple seconds, we all told him, “There is no way you are going to climb that tree.” 

Justin immediately responded, “Yes, I will. It will be easy. I climb trees all the time and have climbed ones much harder than that one.”

Reluctantly, we determined we should let him scale the tree but told him it was not our fault if he hurt himself. He began to ascend the tree starting with the gritty, low hanging dark brown branch on the tree. This branch was rather skinny and did not look to be particularly strong. 

We all watched as he stepped onto the branch. The branch warped but managed to hold against his weight and did not appear to start to break. He began to thrust his arms for the next branch, and then we heard a rather quiet cracking sound from the branch. Immediately following the quiet crack, an extremely sudden ear-piercing crack erupted from the branch and surprised all of us.

Justin immediately had a look of shock on his face. The branch bent like soft plastic and snapped sending, Justin towards the lime green ground where he landed on his back in the wet grass. Shock and concern washed over my face, but only for a second before being replaced with laughter. Luckily for him, the fall itself only added up to two or three feet and didn’t do any real damage to him other than pain. At this point we were hysterically laughing hyenas from his attempt at climbing the bumpy tree. It took him about a minute before he stood back up, and then Justin became mad that we were too focused on laughing and did not ask him if he was even okay. 

After a long period of laughing, we all managed to cease laughing. We   strolled back into the house with Justin limping behind. “What happened?” my grandmother questioned. 

“It’s a long story,” sighed Justin, “ and I don’t want to talk about it.” This caused us to erupt back into laughter, and since that fateful day, Justin has never climbed a tree again.