A Treehouse, a little you-and-me house

What a weekend the three gals from Syracuse picked for a visit to Fern Forest Treehouse. They had booked a year earlier, aiming for peak foliage season, and they hit it spot on. The maples put on a show of gold, orange, and crimson accented with deep green of the pines. Cool nights made for good sleeps and after a hike to the top of Mt. Abe and a soak in the hot tub, the trio hunkered down under blankets high in the trees. In the morning they shuffled in wearing onesies—a tiger, a lion, and a skeleton—for cups of hot black coffee.             Ashley, a singer-songwriter, is known as Syracuse’s “wild child rocker,” and her band, Professional Victims, has played nationally. By day Ashley works at a tech company selling secondary market tech hardware, but at night she takes to the stage in exotic outfits, her long dark hair swinging at her waist. On Saturday night we all sat by the wood stove and she played a few songs on he...

            Whatever happened to that old school custom of family first? My three brothers live in Virginia, Florida and Arizona. Rarely do they visit me in Vermont. If I’m lucky, I see them once a year when I travel to them, but at least we’re in touch through email. For Fern Forest Treehouse guests Robinson and Carleigh, however, family is their rock. Rob’s mother came to New York from the Dominican Republic when she was seventeen. He still has relatives in the Dominican, most of whom don’t speak a word of English. (By the way—baseball is BIG in the Dominican with exported stars like Red Sox David Ortiz, who learned to speak English pretty well.) Spanish was Rob’s first language, which comes in handy when he meets with Hispanic clients in his job as insurance agent and financial consultant in Providence. Carleigh’s dad moved from Italy to the U.S. with his family when he was nine. He taught her to love everything Italia...

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...

The new Hot Springs spa must have something to do with the good night's sleeps I’ve been having lately. I admit that I wasn’t in favor of getting a home equity line of credit for this top-of-the-line item that I categorize as a luxury rather than a necessity. But that was two weeks ago. Now, even when it’s 10F out, I peel out of my socks and slip on flipflops, wrap myself in a big terry towel and pad out to the liquid massage parlor. Nothing like being surrounded by 105F H2O swirling like lava in a volcanic crater, shooting fingers of wet heat onto my muscles sore from gym workouts. A plunge into the spa just before bed is better than popping a pill, better than a couple glasses of Cabernet, almost as good as a shot of Woodford Reserve. It took just a week after installing the spa before the request came from Melissa for a return visit to Fern Forest Treehouse. Melissa came up last fall from Boston for an overnight retreat from her work as assistant to Ophelia Dahl at Partners I...