A Treehouse, a little you-and-me house

             The longest night of the year was also the iciest this December. Taylor and Joe arrived as sleet fell on their big black vehicle. I’d call it a van, but Joe had the body fitted onto a heavy duty 4WD chassis. It’s a monster truck he calls “Vader,” and it’s a good thing he had it on Saturday night.             Joe is a burly guy who generates excitement by thinking outside the box. He’s frugal as well as resourceful and tells us that during college he saved money by sleeping in his car—a sedan—reclining the driver’s seat for comfort. After college he dodged paying rent by buying the van and tricking it out with a double bed, counter and storage space.             Then he met Taylor.             She was paying outrageous rent for an apartment in Burlington, ...

Filmmakers like a lot of drama, and that’s what Java and Tighe got on the stormiest night Fern Forest has seen in a while. “You’d better let them know about the storm before they come,” I told my husband. “I’m sure they’ve checked the weather forecast,” he answered. They had left Brooklyn on Friday, stopping for a night at Lake George. Even if they had cell phone reception, which is always sketchy once one leaves civilization, they may not have thought about the weather. It was Tighe’s birthday weekend, and Java wanted him to have a good time. The two met in film school in New York City. Tighe didn’t travel far from his home in northern Jersey, but Java came all the way from Paris. When I first met her, I thought we’d gotten it wrong about her being French—she didn’t have an accent at all. “I want to speak like an American,” she said, “but I use the French accent to flirt.” It might have been a combination of accent and her dark beauty that attracted Tighe, a movie-...

                       When Adrian and Katie arrived at Fern Forest, I was a little intimidated. Both are muscular with thick Aussie accents, and Adrian’s shaved head and neck tattoos give him an edgy look. It took me a couple days to build up courage to ask about the tattoos, which scroll around his neck in some sort of writing.             I approached cautiously at breakfast and he pulled back the neck of his black hoody. The tattoo on the right side is the name Isaiah, his five-year-old son. The writing on the left—Sage Amelie, his three-year-old daughter. Amelie is for the whimsical French movie about a shy waitress in Paris who does anonymous good deeds for people to make their lives better. It’s Adrian’s favorite movie—mine, too.              There’s sweetness in this couple.        ...

Several of the couples who have been guests at Fern Forest Treehouse met in online dating sites. A few sealed their engagements here. Our latest visitors, Colleen and Dave, met in an internet chat room where people were discussing anything relating to Boston. She was running the vegetable stand at her dad’s farm an hour south of Boston, and Dave lived west of Boston, so their initial dates were virtual ones. Then he came to the farm for a weekend and won her heart. That was thirteen years ago. Dave knew at once that he loved Colleen. It took her a little longer to warm up to this avid member of the Society for Creative Anachronism. She had all she could do getting along in modern life and wasn’t interested in living in the Middle Ages. But Dave’s kindness and sense of humor eventually won her over.   Colleen has a son from a previous marriage and when her parents divorced, her mother moved in with her. Dave has two sons and when his father developed Alzheimer’s, he moved h...

Suzie and her BF Mark are staying in FF Treehouse this weekend. They met in an online dating site. Mark, a SWM, had made several failed attempts at finding a connection, and just as he was about to give up, he caught a glimpse of this SJF who works as an ICU nurse at MGH. Since he’s an engineer at MIT, he liked that she was in a science field and close by. When they came to FF, they’d been dating for 6.5 months. Both components of this attractive couple are just past the 30 checkpoint, and both live active lifestyles. A few weeks ago, wanting a thrilling adventure for Suzie, Mark took her to an indoor climbing wall. She tumbled and tore her ACL.  “You weren’t wearing a harness?” I ask.  “You’re supposed to fall,” she says. “They have soft mats on the floor. But I fell wrong.”  She doesn’t blame Mark, but she’ll be away from the ICU for a couple months after her surgery to repair the injury.  Suzie has a good sense of humor about her work. “Nurses in the ...

             Monday’s our day off at the Treehouse. Guests check out by noon on Sunday, and H and I put in a load of laundry and then pack up and head to Burlington. We have a little condo in the city because H plays hockey on Sunday nights, and we come back on Monday afternoon and clean up, finish the laundry, pull weeds, and relax in the solitary quiet of the woods.             Last Monday after dinner I was out in the front garden ankle deep in myrtle when an old van rattled up the driveway. I thought it was the heating man coming to check the possibility of putting a propane heater in the Treehouse, so I kept bent over, uprooting misbehaving clover. I heard the van door shut and looked toward the driveway. A young man was walking toward me. Trim with sandy blond hair, he was wearing a blue tee shirt with a college logo—University of Passau, I think. “Hello?” I said. He smiled. “Hell...

I’ve been out of touch for a while, but Fern Forest Treehouse has been hopping with activity. One guy hiked his girlfriend up Mt. Abe with a ring in his pocket. At the summit, he popped the question. She said yes and later showed off the ring her fiancé had designed and had made for her. Another weekend, a family of four stayed a few nights with three- and five-year-old daughters, and we had a grand time playing games and roasting marshmallows over a campfire for s’mores. A mom brought her five-year-old son for a weekend, and he taught me to play Monkey Quest on the computer. Doug and Bettina paid us a second visit, this time with their new doggie Winnie. While they were here, these faithful friends made their reservation for next year.          This weekend four young people came to the Treehouse. H told Anny that the Treehouse sleeps only three, and she replied, “That’s okay. We’re all good friends.”         ...

The bombing at the Boston Marathon finish line shocked the world once again, and so soon after the school shootings in Sandy Hook. I’ve lived through other violence—assassinations of John F. Kennedy, Bobby Kennedy, Martin Luther King, the killing of John Lennon, the Oklahoma bombing, the Twin Towers assault. It’s tempting to look at the darkness and feel despair. But there’s another option. One blogger noted that more people were running toward yesterday’s mayhem than away from it. Citizens took off shirts to use as tourniquets. No one worried about getting hands dirty with someone else’s blood. The immediate response of most people nearby was to help. In four years of hosting guests in our treehouse nearly every weekend, we have not had a single negative experience. We’ve hosted Jews, Muslims and devout Christians, white and black Africans, Chinese and Japanese, gays and straights, an ex-convict, and a firefighter who had just come from honoring his fellow firefighters...

     I could write a volume about last weekend's Treehouse guests: Mom Jessica, Dad Will, their two children, and puppy Peanut. Will, handsomely Cuban by heritage, is an accountant born in the year of the Dog, which makes him inherently agreeable and likable. Jessica, of French Canadian ancestry, has a sense of wanderlust not held back by family and canine. She and Will acquired Peanut a decade ago when they bought a house in Los Angeles and jokingly told the sellers they'd take the house if they'd throw in the dog. They did, and Peanut has been with them ever since.       Jessica owns Cucumber Design Company and does most of her work online so she can travel anywhere she can access wifi. When their daughter came along, they moved to New York City and enrolled her in an international school to learn French. Their son followed a few years later, and they moved to Boston to be closer to Jessica's family in Maine. Their hope is to live in France for a fe...

By Saturday morning,  S é bastien  was still undecided about whether to drive the Porsche up from Albany or get his girlfriend Stephanie to take her Hyundai. The weather forecast promised snow in Vermont—a lot of it. But he does love to drive that Boxter. It’s low and fast, a sleek black panther with a cabriolet top for warm, hair blown days. The car’s as exotic as  S é bastien . He’s got that tall, dark French handsomeness about him. Born just outside Paris, he still speaks with a delightful accent even after a decade working in the states. He’s got a PhD in computer science, and I like a guy who gets what I’m saying before I finish saying it. “You’ll need a reservation for dinner at the Bobcat….” And he’s found the number on his phone and is already dialing. Dinner at 7:45, which gave us plenty of time to chat before he and Stephanie slipped and slid down the driveway.         Working as a biomedical engineer is  S é bastien 's...

It’s odd how treehouse guests not only share a bit of themselves when they visit but also act as mirrors for H and me. Each time we have a new guest, we see our view of Mt. Abe in a new light. I look around at H’s beautiful handcrafted lamps as if for the first time. Instead of taking our surroundings for granted, I feel the peacefulness of the forest around us.             Our last treehouse guest, Kimberly, is a makeup artist and has done makeup for stars and models like Naomi Campbell. Since she moved from Florida to Massachusetts, Kimberly’s main clients are brides and bridal parties, prom dates and once in a while a birthday party for thirteen-year-olds.             The evening Kimberly arrived with her handsome boyfriend Phil, I wasn’t wearing makeup. Usually I’ll brush on some mascara, but I feel overdressed in blush and lipstick here in the wilderness. I’m lucky i...

Sarah and Brian arrived at Fern Forest last weekend in a cute Mini Cooper AWD, which trundled up our snowy driveway without a slip. They’re event planners in Massachusetts and organize corporate conferences and festivals for thousands of people—sometimes as many as a hundred thousand. Imagine arranging venues and hotel reservations, designing registration folders with name tags and itineraries, planning meals, scheduling talks and workshops, solving a myriad of problems and answering a hailstorm of questions. Imagine the rise in blood pressure, the surging anxiety. Three weeks earlier, they would have driven their SUV, but there had been an accident. Sarah was driving while Brian reclined in the passenger seat, asleep. They were on the highway, returning from a trip, and Sarah had her ear tuned to the voice of the GPS device to guide her home. When the GPS lady told her to turn right, which would take them south, Sarah knew she should be going north. Could there be a glitch in the...

I was coming down with the flu and in bed when the Russians arrived for a stay in the treehouse. I heard the front door open, the clamor of suitcases and greetings, and a little feminine voice say, “Hi! What’s upstairs?”             We’ll call the girl Verushka. She had just turned a precocious seven. H hadn’t said anything about the guests bringing a child, and when I heard her traipsing up the stairs, I pulled up the covers and pretended to be asleep.             It was Monday. We don’t usually take guests during the week, but H thought the Russians sounded interesting, so he accepted them. They booked the treehouse for three nights.             When I heard Verushka’s parents—Elana and Nureyev, we’ll call them—peppering H with questions, I rolled out of bed and went downstairs to help him entertain, tissue held t...