A Treehouse, a little you-and-me house

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...