Tractors and Books and Vinyl

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 perfect getaway. They came over the snowy Appalachian Gap and it was just dark when Chris gunned the car up the driveway. They didn’t feel like going out into the cold again, so I whipped up a pot of pasta, vegetarian out of respect for Chris’s palate, with chicken sausage on the side for the rest of us. H’s best friend and our closest neighbor Alex came up and joined us because his wife was out of town. Tracey contributed a bottle of wine, tastier (and pricier, I suspect) than the brand I keep on hand. There was talk of wine (Tracey’s sister is in the winery business) and tractors (Alex knows all about brush hogs and tillers and the like) and teaching (H and I are retired public school teachers) and books. Tracey and Chris seemed to enjoy kicking back, which I don’t imagine they get to do very often with a full house.

It was frigid on their first night and below zero in the morning when Chris came in. I offered coffee, and he poured himself a cup and one for Tracey and then tromped back out to the Treehouse, his bootlaces trailing behind him, balancing a cup in each hand. For a boy from New Jersey, he’s pretty hardy.

At breakfast I asked them about their plans for the day. They didn’t have any—just wanted to relax. They spent the day shopping for gifts for family and stopped into the Bobcat for an early dinner. When they returned, Chris said they had found the Goodwill store in South Burlington and filed through boxes of old vinyl records. They found a few collectibles and settled on a fair price.

“Do you have a turntable?” I asked.

“No,” Chris said, “but we like the album covers.”

They lingered by our wood stove before trekking out through single digit temps to the Treehouse for a second night. They climbed the vertical ladder to the loft eight feet above the main floor, putting them 40 feet over the earth. Moonlight reflected off the snow. All was quiet.

Chris said sleeping in the Treehouse was “like being a kid again except you're an adult and it's better.” I’ll bet he listened to vinyl records when he was a kid. Maybe next trip they’ll find a turntable at Restore.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Sex and the Treehouse

Image
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 ...
Read more

Octopus Fishing in Portugal

Image
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...
Read more

A Treehouse guest discovers his roots in an old millstone

Image
In spring 1794, a group of men set their shoulders to clearing land in what is now Lincoln, Vermont. The footpath they blazed into the forest eventually became a road named for the Quakers who came to settle with ox carts holding all their belongings. They were young, strong, and healthy. Once they pried rocks from the fields, they found the soil rich enough to support their crops. A year later, nearly one hundred residents, mostly from New York and Connecticut, scattered over 24,000 acres of wilderness, most living in tiny one-room cabins made from logs they hewed by hand from trees they had cut on their property. They cooked meals in stick-and-mud fireplaces, spun wool from their sheep, wove fabrics to make their own clothing, and cobbled shoes for their families. They hunted game in the forests and guarded their livestock from wolves that prowled the land. When the crops failed and game was sparse, they went hungry. Quaker services were held in homes until they built a m...
Read more