My Treehouse Life
I didn’t realize it was a treehouse, that it would come at a price.
My first visitor declared it so with her Carolina twang and if you could see past the scaffolding, yes, there were trees and my balcony met them right where they branched forth as if to shake my hand. An elm and a willow oak had been planted in tree pits decades before I arrived on W. 85th and they flourished despite less-than-ideal conditions including crowding, pollution, and dog deposits but then so did the rats, restaurants, and resilient citizens. Where I came from, trees took root in backyards and the woods at the top of the hill where we blazed a path as children looking for Lenape Indians. But here was a tree-lined street in Manhattan, and we owned a very minor piece of it, 17 feet off the ground.
The quest that led me to the treehouse began in the aftermath of 9/11, the wake-up call that stakes a question you can’t outrun. As Mary Oliver puts it, “What will you do with your one wild and precious life?” I have always identified as a creator — a writer, performer, a storyteller from grade school through college where I helmed plays and wrote sad poems. And I’d shelved those impulses for the sensible choice of a business career, one where you could make an actual living, something that would pair well with marriage and family. I was proud of the small business I co-created helping teams work better together, and I was lucky to have a talented business partner. My son was 13, my marriage was in stasis, and I felt called to write, to save my own life through the only path I could discern. I had few illusions that writing would transport me out of my life, confer fame, or impact others, but it was an undertaking that could bypass the thought process a conventional life rests upon: Is it useful? Will it help family or improve business? Is it a productive, efficient use of time? Writing is none of these things on its face. It’s a generative act for which you cannot ensure outcomes. You do it because you must, and so I began.
I found writing classes a commute away in New York City with the structure I needed to advance against a blank page. I met lively people who didn’t have to race for the last bus home, women who had cobbled lives together with survival jobs that carried less weight than their creative passions. Here was a ready community who plumbed their imaginations, struggled with the first sentence, risked being vulnerable on the page. We’d head out for a late dinner after class and I found myself alive in a way I can only liken to the giddiness of an adolescent crush — high on the fumes of possibility. “Someday I’m gonna live in this great city amongst you great people,” I said to my new buds, as I hauled out of an Italian joint to make the 66 bus, passing up the free glug of limoncello the waiter was ladling into shot glasses.
It was a secret, crazy dream — the big idea of living in the City, claiming a writing identity. My reality was immutable: I was married with a son in middle school, scheduled with client projects and deadlines, and who would make dinner if not me? I was no more a writer or city dweller than an Olympic figure skater and the dream felt that unrealistic. And yet. As the years stacked up like that pile of “how to write” books and subway maps of the impossible corridors underground, I incubated the dream. Years later, with our son in college and our marriage on tenuous ground, we purchased a pied-a-terre in the storied Upper Westside, where artists, activists, and authentic New Yawkers still lived. Maybe it wasn’t as hip as the Village but it was homey with its leafy blocks of brownstones and Zingone’s vegetable store just down the street. Some people have a beach house or a country retreat. This would be our getaway, a path to re-ignite the marriage with new experiences, long walks in Central Park, and the best food from curry to country French.
These 600 square feet, humble by local standards, became hallowed ground: a place I could think, write, evolve. More classes led to a mid-life MFA. Turns out, my husband’s generous offer to invest our assets in this place was really about my joy not his. Three years into the adventure, we separated. Five years later, we were officially divorced. He is a good man whom I will love all my days. But the space I needed to honor my one wild and precious life turned out to be distinct from what was possible with him. Separation meant so much more than living apart. It meant living where I could trick out an empty nest with the vermiculate that could spark second growth on the maturing bark of my days.
In less than 60 seconds, you can take in my space. An entry just wide enough to don a coat, a kitchen than opens to the dining and living areas with generous windows to the trees that lean into a balcony the size of a nun’s cell. If you scan to the left, you’ll see the bedroom, the bath. I can make a long list of the things I’m living without: my own washer and dryer, room for all the books I acquire, a separate office nook for my consulting work which continues to sustain me, and enough closet to buy frivolous shoes. There are no frivolous shoes in apartment living. The last time I lived in comparable square footage I was in college annotating Middlemarch and dissecting a fetal pig (still with me, that). I’ve had homes of varying vintages and charms, one with 19th century fireplaces boasting original hand-painted tiles and one place that backed up to a nature preserve which I overlooked from my office in a converted fourth bedroom. I’ve been lucky with generous spaces. So why did this tiny space feel so expansive to me?
People, place, proximity.
Turns out, city dwellers understand interdependence in the way suburban folks with cars, fences, and backyards do not. We look out for each other, retract in the subway, expect differences which, to my mind, is a step beyond accepting differences. If you’re looking for plain vanilla, this is not your jam. When your neighbor is literally on the other side of your bedroom wall, you have a constructed closeness that confirms you’re a teeny part of a larger whole, that being in right relationship with the human next door is the only tenable path. Fences make good neighbors? Actually, plaster walls make better ones. I have experienced greater kindnesses in this city than anything I knew in the sprawl of the suburbs: strangers have paid my bus fare on the occasion where I left my MetroCard home and found myself without any loose change. They literally took up a coin collection to pacify the bus driver. I tried to pay them back with singles and fivers but nope, the home health aide and the retired librarian would not accept it. Yes, I do want to live among these people.
You already know, I’m guessing, that there is a museum for every interest and, happily, the finest art on the globe involves a stroll across Central Park which is steps away. Food? Within a three-block radius I can sip a Guinness pulled by an Irish barman, slurp a fresh oyster, twirl linguine with baby clams, take out hummus made to order, and top it off with a macchiato and a warm French crepe. I experience the day on foot, traveling at the speed of life, except when I venture underground to race beneath the busy streets and poke my head up with the curiosity of a prairie dog to discover I’m in Chinatown. I have found friends with wit and grit, bartering insider knowledge on which play not to miss, where to sit at the Blue Note, and which joint on Mulberry St. is not a tourist trap.
With a decade of writing and abiding on 85th under my belt, I’ve discovered that the stories I craft explore how women claim power and how the kitchen table, conference room, or bocce court change as a result. While I accept that I’m not making a huge dent in a world in dire need of reform, I’m contributing with my stories and board service, supporting women theatre artists with recognition and funding. When I imagined a Plan A future that involved a different kind of space — space that would hold me in its embrace and challenge me to shed and renew — I didn’t know it would be an urban treehouse that I would come to call home. But it makes sense, because from here on my balcony, I witness the seasons up close, and I’ve come to understand that it’s only when the leaves give up this year’s life that they are making room, making space, for next year’s growth.
