A Treehouse, a little you-and-me house

              Two folks from Ohio joined us at Fern Forest last weekend. When Meghan was hired to work in the student abroad office at a university, Ryan relocated with her and looked for employment. He had majored in criminology in college, thinking he’d do something in law enforcement. Boy, does he ever.             Ryan started his own commercial security company and has been hired by several department stores. One of them, a discount enterprise whose name I promised not to mention, kept him pretty active. Several times he watched a thief come in, pick up a forty-inch flat-screen TV in its box, and carry it out the front door without a glance toward the check-out lines. In broad daylight, mind you. Others filled one (or sometimes two) shopping carts with merchandise and wheeled out the goods, again without pulling out so much as a library card for payment.             Ryan is muscular and fit, and those robbers were easy to chase down and wrestle to the ground.

Our new friend Addison is a fireball of energy. The only time I saw her still when she  visited Fern Forest Treehouse was when she was watching videos of mischievous cats on H’s iPad. Her jumpiness is fine with us. Addie is an eight-year-old athletic marvel. The only girl on her Little League team, she made the All-Star list this past season. Next year she wants to be the pitcher. She also plays basketball, soccer, does gymnastics, and swims.             Boy, does she swim! Her grandparents Gail and Craig took her to a local swimming hole on the New Haven River on Saturday. From the overhead bridge, an old rope hangs that swimmers used to jump from, but someone attached a new rope that’s longer and sturdier, and that’s what folks use now to swing and drop into the deep pool under the bridge. Addie did that a few times before she got bored. Then she grabbed the rope, swung out, and leaped from the new rope to the old one, swung again and finally let go for a plunge into th