Sunday, August 3, 2008

A Musing: My Tree House Room

A Musing: My Tree House Room

It wasn’t enough to be living in a four person canvas tent, raised off the ground on a wooden platform, somewhere in a white pine forest on a lake in Vermont. No, I had to be sleeping beneath a tree. I would go out and find as large a branch as I could carry and fasten it with a belt to the head of my narrow bed. My camp counselor would quietly disappear it and I would find another. I don’t really know how long that went on before I tired of the dance and had to be satisfied with the pine, balsam, and birch trees surrounding the tent for my daily commune with nature as I awoke in the morning. The blaring revelry horn was too jarring to my senses. This was my daily entrance into the waking world for five summers.

I promised myself that I would someday have a tree house like Robinson Carusoe. That kept me though the long bleak winter days growing up in Manhattan. I was fortunate that I had plenty of time in nature, going for summers to wonderful beach towns, having weekends at friends’ houses in the country, but my longing for the pine forests and the lake water of Vermont always was a backdrop for my dreams.

So many years later, having lived in many beautiful places around the world, I found my way the mountains outside of Boulder. It drew me like a magnet and I knew I was home. The land had three ponds and a creek. My water haven! There were pine, blue spruce, and fir; cottonwoods and aspen; scrub maple, and lilacs. Yes! Behind the small stone house rose the hillside of forest up to the ridge of Sugarloaf. It was protected and surrounded by the loving arms of my Divine Mother, Giam.

The house transformed to a larger house, as rooms were added to accommodate all my children and the ancient wiring, insulation, and windows were replaced to afford a wrap around access to the surrounding trees and sky. My bed room was a small loft above the living room and my bed was nestled beneath a skylight made of panes of glass coming together in a somewhat pyramidal configuration. I could look into the sky and see the tops of the trees in the morning. Getting there… getting to my tree house room. When it rained, it leaked like a siv and we slept with bowls all around us. In the day the sun would cook us.

Then my husband moved on and I started a major renovation of popping up the roof and using the whole attic space to make a fully livable area. A clear story was a great design to give the height needed and let in the light. My loft expanded with windows on three sides of my bed. Now, I awake to the trees to the west where I am facing. There is a trapezoidal window in front of me. To my right, on the north side, are four windows in succession and one of them serves as a door to a deck. Then on the south side are the high up windows of the clear story, looking into the fifty foot tree tops and allowing the full moon to shine in. I have ivy vines growing around the windows and a wide variety of plants all around my bed. Now, I lie in bed in the morning, slowly bringing in the day, with my heart full of gratitude for my tree house room.
Prema Rose

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