A Treehouse, a little you-and-me house

I’m a sucker for stories about yearning. Desire, to me, is the most powerful emotion. Yearning activates my primitive mind so that in a fit of longing I find myself prowling city streets not sure what I’m looking for but relishing the search for whatever it is that calls to me. Some of the best stories in literature are about yearning. In the movie Sabrina , the daughter of a chauffeur for a wealthy family falls in love with the family’s son, playboy David. She can’t have him, of course, because he’s of a higher class, and so older brother Linus steps in to break up the affair by sending Sabrina to Paris, where she learns culinary skills. When she returns, a sophisticated woman of the world, Linus himself falls in love with Sabrina. It doesn’t hurt, of course, to have an all-star cast of Audrey Hepburn falling for William Holden to be swept off her feet ultimately by Humphrey Bogart. What is it about the mixing of classes that twists my heart? In Remains of the Day , by Japanese-Eng...

When Hana asked to book Fern Forest Treehouse for herself and three friends, H said there wasn’t room, the treehouse is only ninety square feet, he didn’t know how they’d sleep. “Oh, we’ll bring sleeping bags,” she wrote. “Don’t worry—we’ll fit in.” H is a pushover, especially for such youthful enthusiasm. And he thought it sounded like a good time. When the four gals pulled in from Boston around eleven Friday night, H was waiting up for them, the path to the treehouse lit by solar lamps, the treehouse itself all aglitter with colored lights. From upstairs, I heard excited giggles as he showed them around, more giggles as they climbed into the spa under a sky studded with a million stars. As happens in water at 102 degrees, the giggles calmed to whispers, and eventually all was quiet. The sun rose clear Saturday morning, warming the treehouse so that the girls were up a little after 7:00 a.m. We were still in bed when I heard water running in the downstairs bathroom, and H and ...

Last weekend Kat and Barb drove up from Northampton, MA, for three rainy days in the treehouse. Kat works as a physical therapist at a nursing home there, and Barb is a researcher, studying the federal budget. A former tenure track prof with a PhD in cognitive neuropathy (specializing in memory), Barb contracted an illness that, ironically, attacked a part of her brain that stores memory. She’s not an amnesiac, however, and knew where she was all weekend—you can’t get lost in Lincoln with Mt. Abe hovering over you from every angle. But she wasn’t able to continue her teaching duties. Fortunately, Barb seems to have a very large brain, judging from our conversations about consciousness and the rate of federal spending on useless trinkets, some of which she told us, but much of which I can’t remember. The only thing that has attacked my brain, it seems, is old age. So, what does one do on a rainy Saturday in Addison County? Smart girls go to the Otter Creek Brewing Compa...

When my short story collection, Full Bloom , came out in April with Brown Fedora Books, editor Jim DeFilippi said he liked the story “Crimson Flower” the best. So that’s the story I chose to read at the Spalding University MFA residency in Louisville last month. There’s a scene in the story when an ex-priest goes into a New Orleans bar (no, this is not a joke), and some old songs from the Vietnam era are playing on the jukebox, a Neil Young classic and “Crimson and Clover” by Tommy James and the Shondells. I was to be the fourth reader, following two playwrights, and I figured if I sang the lines from the songs instead of just reading them, I’d stand a chance of holding the audience. Problem is, I have a wretched singing voice. One of my brothers sang baritone with the Arizona Repertory Company—classical stuff—and was in big demand for musicals. Another brother was a member of an elite madrigal group when he was younger, and the third brother was lead singer in a rock ‘n’ roll band. He...

I admit it—I’m a technology slut, as much as I can afford to be. I live at the end of a long gravel driveway that winds uphill from a dirt road in a small town surrounded by national forest. But I’ve got DSL and cell phone recep and satellite HDTV and a Bose radio-CD player and a desktop, a laptop and a netbook. I Skype and facebook and tweet, all in the shadow of the majestic Mount Abraham. But until Chris brought his sweetheart Megan to Fern Forest, I didn’t know what I was missing. Chris works for a gaming startup that designs scavenger hunts for iPhone and iPad. Cool idea for museum crawls, corporate employee bonding, city tours, education, and individual fun. After he graduated from Andover Academy, he did his undergrad work at St. Andrews College in Scotland studying international relations and drama. He’d like to be an actor but the scavenger gig pays real money, so he’s biding his time until he gets his Hollywood break. Megan recently returned from a year of teaching Eng...