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...

            “In dreams and in life, nothing is impossible.” Jared and Emily left this fortune cookie adage in the Treehouse guestbook when they checked out last weekend. It seems appropriate that I read it on the day of Meghan Markle’s wedding to Prince Harry because, as it turns out, Emily and Jared will follow their lead in the autumn of next year.             Jared was a bundle of nerves when he texted H about the best way to propose to Emily during their upcoming weekend at Fern Forest Treehouse. H suggested they climb Mt. Abraham and he pop the question at the summit. But it was a chilly day in mid-May and although they are both marathon runners, Jared wanted a venue more relaxing. We offered a couple other ideas—a soak in the hot tub, borrowing the mic at a local music concert, or taking the gondola to the top of the mountain in Stowe. None of those idea floated with Jared.  F...

Looking for love? Try getting a dog. Then take said dog to the local dog park. Toss a ball and watch the canines chase it. Could be that one of those ball hounds belongs to someone looking for another someone just like you.              That happened to last weekend’s Treehouse guests Amy and Hans. Amy has a rescue sheltie-spaniel mix named Bean. Hans’s Allie, also a rescue, is a cross between a chihuahua and a whippet. For doggies who look so different, they seemed to get along fine at the dog park outside Boston. So fine, in fact, that Hans and Amy had plenty of time to get acquainted. After tossing balls and watching the pups play, Hans suggested he and Amy have coffee sometime. She agreed, and he said he’d call her. Trouble was, he walked away without getting Amy’s number. It was a slap-your-forehead moment for Hans, but he figured he’d see her again at the dog park.              Luc...

            When Kelly walked into the big cat house at Boston’s Franklin Park Zoo, she broke into tears.   She has wanted to be a zookeeper since she was in college but she was focused on ungulates, hoofed animals like giraffes, pigs, deer, and hippopotamuses. That was before she met the lions. In that single moment she realized what she wanted to do with her life.             Kelly is very pretty with a mane of long, lion-colored hair. Always protected by a barrier, she says the tigers are a challenge to train, but she trains the lions by praising them and giving treats when they do as she asks. She gets an old male to open his mouth so she can check his teeth and gums for sores, and if he has a cut on a paw pad, she has taught him to hold up his paw so she can reach through the mesh to apply an ointment. When the lion behaves badly, she ignores him and he doesn’t g...

           Last weekend's guests at  Fern Forest  brought us the tradition of the Catalon Christmas pooping log. That’s right—a log that poops—presents. Ari, from Catalonia, and Juan, from Colombia, brought their daughters Maia and Mar for a second visit to the Treehouse, this time with åvia (grandmother) Anna visiting from Barcelona. On one of their three nights with us, they told us that Santa doesn’t bring children gifts in Catalonia. They get gifts from Caga Tió , the log with a smiling face and a red stocking cap.               Beginning with the Feast of the Immaculate Conception on December 8, children place a bit of food in front of Tió every night and cover him with a blanket to keep him warm. If they take good care of the log, it will poop gifts for them. The tradition goes that on Christmas Day the children leave the room to practice their Tió de Nadal songs and pr...

             My biggest regret about being a student at George Washington University in the late ‘60s and early ‘70s is that I didn’t take photos at the student rallies to protest the Vietnam War. I thought about those times this past weekend when Mike and Chantal visited Fern Forest. They’re both artists. Mike constructs public installations of huge mosaic tile images, and Chantal heads the graphic art program at Tufts. They had booked the Treehouse to celebrate the thirteenth birthday of their beautiful, dewy-eyed daughter Leyla.   Mike Mandel, "Myself: Timed Exposures, 1971"                   Chantal has published several books of her artwork, and I’m especially drawn to the images overlaid with words. The Turk and the Jew is my favorite, a visual documentation of her courtship with Mike. She’s from Turkey, a round-face beauty who holds the steady job while Mike fishes f...

             What do you get when you cross a dairy farmer with an English teacher? You get Jan and Bill from Gilbertsville, New York. This past weekend they took a break from their busy lives to spend a couple nights at Fern Forest Treehouse.             Never heard of Gilbertsville? I hadn’t either. A little over three hours northwest of New York City near Cooperstown, Gilbertsville has a population of fewer than four hundred citizens. Just one square mile in size, during the late 19 th and early 20 th century the town was a summer retreat for wealthy city slickers. The Major’s Inn, built on the site of Gilbertsville’s founder, is a 55-room historic mansion in English Tudor style. Nearby, a stone bridge arcs gracefully over Butternut Creek.             Bill’s organic dairy farm is just outside town. At 75, he...

I’m grateful to live in an age when without blinking an eye two women can ask to spend their honeymoon in our treehouse. Younger readers may take such a thing for granted, but years ago there was a fair chance that a hotel or B&B wouldn’t accept an unmarried couple of any sexual orientation. Gays or lesbians would have to present themselves as friends and would be given a room with two beds.             But not anymore. When Sarah reserved the Treehouse with her new wife Sommer, we had a nice flower arrangement waiting for them and a half-bottle of champagne in the refrigerator. No worries about champagne—they brought a full bottle of their own. We welcomed them with hugs and congratulations.             H and I are planning the wedding of our older boy, so I picked the brains of these experienced event planners, taking notes as they spoke about th...

When guests arrive for a weekend at Fern Forest Treehouse, I always look for some common ground to make them fee l comfortable. That’s often not an easy task when a couple is half our age (sometimes even less) and from a different section of the country. But with Danielle and Sty, it was a no-brainer—our common element was the King of Rock ‘n’ Roll.             My son Bry was born on January 8, Elvis’s birthday. Danielle and Sty were married in Las Vegas—by Elvis. At least, he looked like Elvis and sang almost as well, but when he signed the marriage certificate, the ruse was revealed. He was not the real Elvis.             But when you’re in Las Vegas, fantasy becomes reality. A limo met the couple at their hotel and transported them to the little white chapel. Elvis was waiting at the door with flowers for Danielle in one hand and a mic in the other. She took his arm, ...

Southern Baptist minister Reverend Walter assures me he is not one of those Pentecostal preachers who handles rattlesnakes to prove God’s protection. He handles them for a different reason. This week the Treehouse was honored with a visit from the pastor of a Baptist church in Georgia. Walter, as he asked me to call him, and his wife Wanna were taking their granddaughter Lily on an East Coast odyssey. Lily is home-schooled, and Walter thought they could enhance her learning with visits to the Shenandoah Valley, where many of the Civil War skirmishes took place, and Gettysburg, where Robert E. Lee was defeated in the conflict that took more lives than any other battle of the war. Lily got to see a little of Boston, where the Yankees claim to have been America’s first settlers. We southerners know, of course, that Virginia’s Jamestown colony was established eleven years before the pilgrims set foot on Plymouth Rock. But the Baptists’ GPS was set for farther north, and on Mond...

            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...