A Treehouse, a little you-and-me house

What is all the hoopla about Descartes? Blake is the third philosophy PhD (he has two years to go at Rutgers; see earlier blog for visit of philosophy profs) who claims Descartes as his favorite philosopher. “Favorite” seems like a rather pedestrian word to associate with such a high thinker. Descartes, just so we’re on the same page, is the “I think, therefore I am” guy whose roots lie with Aristotle and St. Augustine. He also founded analytic geometry, by the way, and insisted on the absolute freedom of God’s act of creation. Descartes was no lightweight. Blake and his family arrived at Fern Forest on a chilly Friday night in the midst of a nor’easter. It’s not winter yet in Vermont, but there was a deluge of rain and pretty stiff winds. We told Blake, his wife Ruth and their four-year-old twins that they were welcome to camp out in the guest room of the main house, but Ruth, who is from Thailand, said they were up for the adventure. They had skidded on slick roads in their old Suba...

Rottweilers used to make me nervous, but Titan has changed things. Titan brought his friend Roberto for a couple nights in the treehouse. They are Airbed and Breakfast hosts in Medford, Massachusetts, where Roberto decorated the Victorian house in a manner David Bromstad might approve. The house is surrounded by gardens Roberto spends a couple hours a day tending. Pass under the rose-vined arbor and wind down the stone path guarded by statuary and urns spouting ivy. Or go inside and sit in the green room with violet draperies or perch on the red leather Elvis couch in the media room. Take a shower with orchids nodding overhead. Have breakfast at the kitchen nook and watch the morning news on the television bolted to the wall. Afterward, stroll down to Tufts University or take a bus to Harvard, MIT, BU or BC. I can’t wait to go there. So what in the world was Roberto doing booking two nights in a treehouse? “I needed a vacation,” he said. I can only imagine how busy he must be with gue...

“Do you do yagli gures?” I asked Ozan. Ceren giggled. Then she corrected my pronunciation. Ozan blushed. I’d been doing a little research before breakfast. “No,” Ozan said. “It is a traditional sport, done only in certain areas of Turkey.” H looked puzzled, so I said, “Yagli gures is oiled wrestling.” “It’s disgusting,” Ceren said. “They grab each other.” Well, I thought that was the point. I can’t help flashing back to the fireplace scene in Women In Love with Alan Bates wrestling nude with Oliver Reed—but I digress. Ozan is more interested in football—soccer where he comes from. For the past two years Ceren (the C in Turkish is pronounced J) and Ozan have lived in Montreal, where she goes to school for photography and he works in a French restaurant. But they call Istanbul home. H was a history major in college and says Istanbul used to be Constantinople. Ozan adds before that it was Byzantium. As in Yeats’s poem, “Sailing to ...

Usually we get to know a lot about our Treehouse guests—from their cultural backgrounds to their astrological signs. But instead of talking about themselves, Poornima and Peter asked questions about us. For H: Tell us about your time in Australia (Nima had found my book in the treehouse, While In Darkness There Is Light). H traveled to Far North Queensland after graduating from Harvard in 1973 and met up with boarding school friend Charlie Dean on a commune run by American college dropout friends— all the details are in the book. For me: What brings you to Vermont? In 1975 I came with a man who had spent autumns picking apples in Shoreham and was planning to go to medical school at UVM but ended up working for the Burlington newspaper, eventually running it. A relationship with a journalist is nearly as difficult as a relationship with a doctor—I learned the hard way. We’re not used to having the tables turned on us. When you visit Fern Forest, it’s about you, not about us. But we li...

Connor and Ruth were late. “They’re not coming,” H said. “They’re Canadian,” I said. “They’ll make good on their reservation.” They arrived at Fern Forest about seven, having gone to North Conway for some shopping. Connor is one of those rare guys, an artist who likes to cook and shop. No wonder Ruth fell in love with him. H and I had just finished supper and offered to make them a dinner reservation. They said they’d had a late lunch and had brought some snacks they’d eat in the treehouse and, since they’d been in the car for several hours, they didn’t feel like going back out. H had to go to Burlington to play hockey, so I offered wine or beer. Ruth had water; Connor accepted a beer. I had an après dinner shot of bourbon. Ruth has a wide smile that made me want to hug her as soon as I met her. Connor is handsome and compact and to my offer of cheese and crackers said, “Oh, we’re fine. Don’t bother with food.” I served cheese and crackers anyway, ...

What a delight to have my former student and fellow children’s author Edie Hemingway come to Fern Forest with her husband Doug for a night in the treehouse. Edie was one of the early graduates of Spalding University’s MFA in Writing program, and both of us were feeling our way through the academic wilderness. I had published a few books and she had co-authored two middle-grade works of historical fiction, so we were more like colleagues than mentor-mentee. I admit that I was a little full of myself in those days, having been invited by the best-selling author Sena Jeter Naslund to serve on the faculty when she began the program in 2001. But Edie was no stranger to publishing. She planned to attend the SCBWI conference in New York, and I joined her there, along with a couple other Spalding MFA students. We met an editor from Scholastic, who invited us to submit our books for consideration. I sent him my first novel, The Black Bonnet , about the underground railroad in Vermont. He reject...