Every day we go to the park across the way and enjoy the huge, hundreds-years-old trees. Looking into their high branches, we are reminded of hours spent hiding out as a kid in the chestnut tree in our garden whose lowest branch we could just reach if we stood on the fence next to it, allowing us the ability to clamor up the trunk.

Decades later, we WISH we could climb some of the trees in the park, and wonder, in our minds eye, WHY NOT just put a ladder up to one to give our creaky adult selves a boost up.

Then we stumbled on images of L’Arbre aux Echelles — The Tree with Ladders — an installation by French artist François Méchain on the grounds of Château de Chaumont by the Loire River in France. It is, he writes:

“a poetic invitation to look at the world from another point of view, from further away, from higher up.”

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THAT’S what we want: a perfect manifestation of our imaginings.

In the meantime, perhaps one very early, unpopulated dawn, we will take a ladder into the park, and prop it against a tree…and climb…