A Treehouse, a little you-and-me house

When I told Vaki we’re Afrophiles, he said he’d never heard that word. For years I’ve loved the writing of African-American writers. Years ago I took a course at UVM in African culture and even learned a few phrases in Swahili. A writer friend wrote a beautiful novel called The Hissing Tree about a girl growing up in Rhodesia and her fascination with Zulu warriors. My stepson Will has been to Ghana several times, and his best friend married a Ghanaian woman. I’ve never been to Africa, but it claims the first humans and its cultural and geographical diversity entice me. Vaki brought Africa to Fern Forest. He wanted to do something special for his wife Laurel, and a night in a treehouse was just the thing. Laurel is tiny and sprightly and reached out to us with gregarious warmth. Vaki is imposing. He stands a few inches taller than H, who is well over six feet. He has dark wooly hair and a wooly beard, but his smile lights up a room. The youngest of eleven children, Vaki was born in New ...

Ann was studying in Spain for a semester, living with a Spanish family. When the university had a break, Portugal called. It’s an old country, remains of the first settlements dating back to the Neolithic period, five thousand years before Christ. The Visigoths invaded in the sixth century. In 1986, the hills were covered in wildflowers, and horses grazed in fields crimsoned with red geraniums. On the southern coast of Portugal, the area of Algarve is dotted with small fishing villages. Santa Luzia, Tavira, Lisboa, Faro, Cape Sagres, Salema. From the gold dust beaches, one can look across the sea to the shores of Morocco. Bathers swim topless—young women, old women, bathing tops cast aside, breasts bared to the sun. Ann felt strange covering herself. She was just nineteen and modest, but she wanted to fit in, to be accepted, even among these strangers on the beach. She’d worn a one-piece tank suit but slipped the straps off her shoulders, rolled down the suit’s upper half, lay...

A British study found that Australian men make the worst husbands in the world. For one, they loathe helping out with the housework. Aussie men are known for their sexism. Mel Gibson addressed a female fan as “sugar tits.” The former Prime Minister of Australia once told female reporters: "I will not be harassed by journalists, even pretty ones like you. Nick off." A Sydney magistrate, peering down at a young female defendant in a mini-skirt, told her: "Come back when your IQ is as high as your skirt." Union leader Martin Ferguson described women campaigning for paid maternity leave as "hairy-legged femocrats." (dailymail.co.uk) Generally Australian men are known for drinking too much, starting fights, and “bitch slapping.” Women would do better to eschew Australian men and look for a mate from Scandinavia, the U.S. or Britain. “Henry doesn’t seem Australian,” H said. “Of course he’s Australian,” I said. “He’s from Melbourne.” “I know,” H said. “But he’s....

Albert Einstein said, “ Most of the fundamental ideas of science are essentially simple, and may, as a rule, be expressed in a language comprehensible to everyone.” Perhaps that’s true. But contemplating the science of the brain boggles my mind. The mental organ is so complex, according to experts, that we have no words to describe it because we have no concepts with which to imagine it, not even in science fiction. Just ask Cristin and Ethan. They are both neuroscientists who married a week ago and spent part of their honeymoon at Fern Forest camped out in the treehouse. Cristin recently defended her PhD thesis and is packing up to move from Philadelphia to Baltimore to live with her new husband. Ethan is doing post-doc work at Johns Hopkins University in neurotransmitters, specifically looking at causes and cures for muscular sclerosis. Cristin landed a job with the FDA in D.C., where she’ll be researching the way the brain controls neuroprostheses, the new technology fo...