A Treehouse, a little you-and-me house

Who remembers being twenty? If I rack my brain, I can vaguely recall being in a state of complete confusion. I had taken secretarial courses and was working at a law firm for a bully of a senior partner who kept me at my desk until late at night as he dictated corporate documents. I hated every minute of it, which is why I decided I had put off college long enough.               Estlin—who is twenty—and Billy—barely twenty-one—are a different sort of young adult than I was. They may be the youngest couple to stay at Fern Forest Treehouse, and they may also hold the record for booking the coldest weekend ever. They had skied on Friday and settled into the treehouse as the temperature dipped to minus ten. In the morning when they came in for breakfast, I asked, “Did you get cold?” “No,” Estlin said. “It was toasty.” They gobbled everything H and I put in front of them, fueling their furnaces for a c...

Here at Fern Forest Treehouse , we’ve rarely met a more unlikely couple than Antoinette and Chris. They met online in the early days of AOL chat rooms. It was a random chat room and the connection was innocent. She was eleven—although she told him she was fifteen—and he was indeed fifteen. She was in middle school in New York City and he was in high school in Vermont. She was an ace student and he struggled with ADHD. She had aspirations of a top college followed by law school. He just hoped to get into a college. He’s tall and slim with cropped strawberry blond hair. She’s petite with dark curly hair and comes from a Spanish-speaking home. Five years of online chatting and exchange of photos and videos deepened their relationship, but they still hadn’t met face to face. Then when Antoinette was sixteen, her parents—whom she describes as “very liberal”—allowed her to take the train to Vermont to meet Chris. They were already in sync through their screen relationship, but seeing he...

Normally  H and I host visitors at Fern Forest Treehouse in Vermont , but occasionally we travel and get to experience what it's like to be a guest. Staying with my brother outside of Tucson was such an opportunity. Arizona is a long way from Northern Virginia where Butch and I grew up. In Vail, south of Tucson, it’s not unusual to see a bobcat sauntering down the street or a black widow spider weaving a web in the garage. Butch’s wife Mary Beth teases the tarantulas but avoids the scorpions she often sees when she takes out the trash. I always recognize their house by the saguaro cactus in the front yard, those tall limby plants that look almost human once they grow arms. At Christmas Butch snuggles a Santa cap on its prickly top to keep off winter’s chill. Saguaros don’t like cold. Butch moved to Arizona three decades ago, and it had been three years since I’d seen him. He has had a myriad of health problems—heart, colon cancer, gall bladder, and backaches. H and I agr...