A Treehouse, a little you-and-me house

I’m pressed against a baby carriage that is wedgeded against a metal barrier. A baby is asleep in the carriage. The afternoon sun is bright, and I adjust my body to cast a shadow over the child. Her sweet talcum scent rises from the carriage. The mother, a redhead, is fair and has a long white scarf over her head and shoulders to shield her from the Parisian sun. There is no shade, and I feel my skin burning.                 We are shoulder to shoulder, chest to back—thousands of us. I’ve been standing in Place des Pyramides for an hour waiting for bicyclists to roll over the finish line in the Tour de France race. Across the road, a crowd of Swiss sing a song in German or Austrian—yell it, really—and wave flags.                 The baby is crying and the back of the redhead mother’s neck is red. She has had too much sun. My throat is dry. The boy beside me—he’s...

Out of the blue a young woman named Meaghan requested to friend me on Facebook. I’ve had several ambiguous friend requests from cute young women and usually I click “ignore.” But Meaghan was different. Not that she isn’t cute. She’s lovely, in fact. It was something else—call it a vibe. I don’t friend anyone without first investigating them, and I discovered that Meaghan was in the process of bicycling across the country to raise money for three charities. Playing For Change Foundation builds schools for children in places that lack the resources to do so. Trees for the Future uses an agroforestry system to plant trees in deforested areas and educates people about rebuilding land to be sustainable. The Connecticut Chapter of Surfrider collaborates to keep beaches and ocean waters clean and to protect natural habitats along the Connecticut coastline. That all sounded pretty good to me. Meaghan left Seattle June 1 and celebrated her 31 st birthday on June 6 in Portland. When s...