temporary homemaking.

notes from a peripatetic summer.

There’s a book on the shelf here at the lake called Tree Houses You Can Actually Build. It’s got signature 1990s primary colors and jorts on the cover and it proudly proclaims itself a weekend project book which is a bold and mildly sadistic claim to make for a book marketed to families with small children. It’s the kind of manual that’s perfect for getting ideas and making plans on a rainy day and also the kind of book that could drive a parent to drink. The chipper, can-do spirit of the text isn’t lost on my kids and the pages contain a seemingly endless supply of sentences that they’ve committed to memory:

“The platform for this house can be built in a day,” for instance.

And, “Every tree house NEEDS an emergency escape hatch…” (Emphasis theirs.)

Don’t forget: “If you are lucky enough to have more than one tree house, here is how you can bridge the gap…” This, helpfully followed by an elaborate drawing of a rope suspension bridge.

The fact that there’s an existing, only slightly dilapidated treehouse on this property does not deter my children from hoping to expand and improve upon the domicile, which is how I found myself spending my morning threading inch-long pine cones onto cotton string and tying lengths of butcher’s twine around empty yogurt jars. Into the yogurt jars I plopped what I could find: A stem of cosmos plus soft cedar make festive woodland arrangements for a treehouse, should anyone like to know. Pinecone garlands can make even an abandoned hideout immediately more homey and a birchbark welcome mat isn’t wrong, no matter how tenuous the threshold. A handful of nails make hooks for binoculars and flashlights and clusters of fallen lichen, all of which can be useful in homesteading and can at least temporarily cure the desire for a hatch door through which to sweep “sticks, leaves, and dirt.”

We arrived back to the lake last night after a few nights of camping. Before that we spent a few nights sharing a rented house further down the Maine coast while Rose and I sold books. Before that it was a few nights at my parents’ house, a handful of days back in Brooklyn, a different trip entirely up to the lake in Maine. My family hasn’t spent much more than a week in any one spot this summer, which has been a good cure for wanderlust and good cure for boredom, but a challenge for always feeling settled. Like puppies chasing their tails until they flop contentedly onto a coil on the floor, we sometimes flail for a moment before getting comfortable.

There are habits, though, and objects, that make the settling come sooner and the comfort come quicker.