A Treehouse, a little you-and-me house

I want to stay with Tracey and Chris for a couple days and talk to their three children. They all read and can tell me what’s hot in books for young people. Knights? Princesses? Wizards? Vampires? Clue me in, kiddies and I’ll invent an adventure. Chris’s own tastes are a bit more sophisticated. He teaches high school English, coaches the school newspaper, and currently is reading Roberto Bolaño, a Chilean author who writes about dreams and hallucinations and the lost young voices of revolution. Heady stuff. Tracey is an art teacher working on her own abstract compositions. They visited Fern Forest during school vacation, taking a break from their farmhouse near Amherst, Massachusetts, and leaving the children in the able hands of the grandparents. When they’re home, life is busy. In the summer Chris uses his tractor to harvest five cords of wood to keep his three stoves burning. Tracey has a hive of bees and tends a Morgan horse, chickens, several cats and a dog. The Treehouse was the ...

Sometimes you just know. Laura and Will knew. The couple made their way from Philadelphia to Fern Forest for Presidents Day weekend. They had a little trouble getting over the Appalachian Gap in their old Honda. Philadelphians don’t bother with snow tires, which are de rigueur for Vermont’s mountain passes. It took Will three tries, skidding around in the road each time, before he coaxed the Honda over the summit. Laura sat quietly in the passenger seat. She believes in her man. Will is a lawyer, and Laura is working on her PhD in art history at Temple University with a focus on 19 th Century American still life. She is a natural beauty. They met during college met when they were summer camp counselors. Will was a year ahead of Laura, she at Dickinson College and he at University of Virginia. I’ve heard of those camp counselor romances—they usually end when the campers pack up to go home. But these two kept in touch. They met up on school vacations. When sh...

I just heard that another of my Spalding University MFA in Writing students is having a book published. This one is IF I LIE by Corinne Jackson, coming out in ’12 with Simon Pulse. That makes how many of my former students who have published books? Oh, I’ve lost count. Mostly they’re young adult or middle grade books, a market that is popping with energy. I’ve published two YA novels and a picture book for young readers, but I’m overdue for a new title. So I was pretty excited to learn that Jennifer had booked two nights at the Treehouse. Jennifer worked in children’s book publishing in Manhattan but left after the 9-11 attacks. She lived in mid-town, close enough to the devastation to understand that she didn’t want to be in the city any longer. So she bought an old Victorian farmhouse cottage in the Berkshires and set up an enterprise with her second passion—gardening. She designs and tends gardens for homeowners and also rents out rooms for those busy wedding weekends in the beautif...

Fern Forest guest Arthur is in his first year of law school at Yale. His girlfriend Juliana works in health care policy at a non-profit think tank in Washington, DC, focusing on improving access and quality of care for low-income people. A year ago they met at a party of mutual friends. I don’t blame them for falling for each other. Both have good looks and brains. I’m not sure if it was smarts or a spirit of adventure that caused them to book a cold February weekend in the treehouse for their ann iversary and an early Valentine’s Day. Arthur attended junior h igh school in Ivory Coast when his father was stationed in Africa working as a senior economist with the International Monetary Fund. After that they moved to Haiti, where they lived for three years before leaving in ’86 when dictator Jean-Claude "Baby Doc" Duvalier was forced out of office for plundering tens of millions of pounds of state funds. Arthur was happy to come back to the States, where he enrolled at ...

Artist Amber’s website bears the quote by poet Jean Wahl: “Le moutonnement des haies C'est en moi que je l'ai” (The frothing of the hedges/ I keep deep inside of me .") The hedges weren’t exactly frothing when she and Michael visited Fern Forest for two January nights in the treehouse—at least, not that we noticed. The ferns are still buried under deep snow, and the maples are bare. But it was Amber’s 30th birthday, and maybe she was frothing about that (although she looks ten years younger) . They came down from Montreal, where Michael works in construction on renovation projects. An artist and a construction worker in Montreal? How do they manage? “It’s not expensive to live in Montreal,” says Michael. “Food is cheap, and I don’t have a TV. I only watch TV w hen I visit my family in Saskatchewan.” He works on expensive projects, where his clients want the best of everything. “You must be well versed in what’s the best,” I said. “I’m learning,” he said. “It’s fun. I ...