A Treehouse, a little you-and-me house

Stanford. West Point. Harvard. Treehouse guests Kim and Brendan do not lack for education. They met in middle school and were friends all through high school. Good enough friends to go to the senior prom together. Good enough friends to stay in touch when Brendan went off to West Point. Such good friends, in fact, that when he came home one summer, they reconnected. And they fell in love. They were married in a ceremony at West Point, Brendan handsome in his military uniform. West Point means a five-year commitment for service in the Army, but a medical problem earned him a discharge. When Kim got a job at Stanford, he earned a graduate degree there. When she got a job at the Harvard Business School, he enrolled for an MBA. He’ll be doing an internship this summer and has job possibilities lined up. If they have to relocate from Boston, Kim is okay with that. She rolls with whatever comes along. She’s committed to Brendan for better or worse. Even when worse is...

It was sweet of Lynne to bring boyfriend Dave to the treehouse for his 38th birthday. They were both born in the Year of the Ox and, in true Ox form, they work hard. Lynne is employed in an oral surgeon’s office. “We don’t fix teeth,” she says. “We pull teeth and do implants. If you can’t afford to have teeth worked on, you come to us. We are the last resort.” I stuck my tongue into the gap between two molars, remembering when my mother had one of my teeth pulled. Too many marshmallow chickens at Easter, I guess. The surgeon should have put an implant in the space to keep the other molars from slanting, causing the gum to recede. Anyway, too much information. And it’s too late for undoing the damage. Lynne’s teeth are straight and white. She has that rosy disposition you expect when you go in to have your teeth looked at. Sweet. Polite. Instantly likable. Dave is a plumber, working mostly on corporate buildings. He starts at 7:00 a.m. and by 3:30, he’s done for the day and off to ...

Todd drove up from Massachusetts to meet Abbey’s bus coming from Montreal. She was taking a hiatus from her third year of law school at McGill to spend two nights with Todd at Fern Forest Treehouse. I was looking forward to meeting them and learning what these two energetic young people are up to. But that didn’t happen. At least not right off. Abbey takes her studying seriously. She brought snacks. And books. She was staring final exams in the face and was prepared to study the night away, high up in the maples. Todd is founder, executive director and lead guide of International Peace Park Expeditions, a peace-building operation for college kids designed to “nurture the next generation of leaders for a more peaceful global community,” according to his website. He had preparations to make for the upcoming 16-day expedition at a peace park in the Balkins. He would work into the night next to Abbey. We’d have to wait until morning to get acquainted with these assi...

I want to stay with Tracey and Chris for a couple days and talk to their three children. They all read and can tell me what’s hot in books for young people. Knights? Princesses? Wizards? Vampires? Clue me in, kiddies and I’ll invent an adventure. Chris’s own tastes are a bit more sophisticated. He teaches high school English, coaches the school newspaper, and currently is reading Roberto Bolaño, a Chilean author who writes about dreams and hallucinations and the lost young voices of revolution. Heady stuff. Tracey is an art teacher working on her own abstract compositions. They visited Fern Forest during school vacation, taking a break from their farmhouse near Amherst, Massachusetts, and leaving the children in the able hands of the grandparents. When they’re home, life is busy. In the summer Chris uses his tractor to harvest five cords of wood to keep his three stoves burning. Tracey has a hive of bees and tends a Morgan horse, chickens, several cats and a dog. The Treehouse was the ...

Sometimes you just know. Laura and Will knew. The couple made their way from Philadelphia to Fern Forest for Presidents Day weekend. They had a little trouble getting over the Appalachian Gap in their old Honda. Philadelphians don’t bother with snow tires, which are de rigueur for Vermont’s mountain passes. It took Will three tries, skidding around in the road each time, before he coaxed the Honda over the summit. Laura sat quietly in the passenger seat. She believes in her man. Will is a lawyer, and Laura is working on her PhD in art history at Temple University with a focus on 19 th Century American still life. She is a natural beauty. They met during college met when they were summer camp counselors. Will was a year ahead of Laura, she at Dickinson College and he at University of Virginia. I’ve heard of those camp counselor romances—they usually end when the campers pack up to go home. But these two kept in touch. They met up on school vacations. When sh...

I just heard that another of my Spalding University MFA in Writing students is having a book published. This one is IF I LIE by Corinne Jackson, coming out in ’12 with Simon Pulse. That makes how many of my former students who have published books? Oh, I’ve lost count. Mostly they’re young adult or middle grade books, a market that is popping with energy. I’ve published two YA novels and a picture book for young readers, but I’m overdue for a new title. So I was pretty excited to learn that Jennifer had booked two nights at the Treehouse. Jennifer worked in children’s book publishing in Manhattan but left after the 9-11 attacks. She lived in mid-town, close enough to the devastation to understand that she didn’t want to be in the city any longer. So she bought an old Victorian farmhouse cottage in the Berkshires and set up an enterprise with her second passion—gardening. She designs and tends gardens for homeowners and also rents out rooms for those busy wedding weekends in the beautif...

Fern Forest guest Arthur is in his first year of law school at Yale. His girlfriend Juliana works in health care policy at a non-profit think tank in Washington, DC, focusing on improving access and quality of care for low-income people. A year ago they met at a party of mutual friends. I don’t blame them for falling for each other. Both have good looks and brains. I’m not sure if it was smarts or a spirit of adventure that caused them to book a cold February weekend in the treehouse for their ann iversary and an early Valentine’s Day. Arthur attended junior h igh school in Ivory Coast when his father was stationed in Africa working as a senior economist with the International Monetary Fund. After that they moved to Haiti, where they lived for three years before leaving in ’86 when dictator Jean-Claude "Baby Doc" Duvalier was forced out of office for plundering tens of millions of pounds of state funds. Arthur was happy to come back to the States, where he enrolled at ...