The Tree House

“There are a lot of them in this world"   and each has a string tied to a human heart that says Yes, this is the place for it is the place that most resembles heaven in the mind and heart of the beholder. I like to think that I saved this little Pondersa Pine seedling from inevitable doom. I first noticed it last summer trying to work it's way out from under a telephone company's utility box. I knew that I would eventually dig it up when the weather and season was right.  It happened on March 9th, 2019. Protected by rocks and limbs from nibbling elk.

One of my earliest memories was that of sitting on my mother's lap listening to the words from Robert Louis Stevenson's My Shadow . She read it from the armchair of the living room in the old house on our little farm in Iowa. I remember still that it was in the morning after my three older brothers had climbed on board the yellow country school bus - that was in 1954 and I was five years old. It was only then that I had my mother to myself.  Later, I memorized the poem because my mother had told me how, when she was a little girl, her mother had read it to her and she had committed it to memory. I felt it was in some way my duty to follow suit. The poem still occasionally surfaces in my thoughts and did so again last week when my daughter Sara sent me the photo she snapped at the family cabin in Pine, Arizona. "Look at the shadow's Dad", were the words in her text. I did so and once again I was on my mother's lap in the armchair of the living room in

Unfold thy face, unmask thy ray, Shine forth, bright Sunne, double the day. Let no malignant misty fume, Nor foggy vapor, once presume  To interpose thy perfect sight This day, which makes us love thy light.  Richard Crashaw, 1613

Glory be to God for dappled things- For skies of couple-color as a brinded cow; For rose-moles all in stipple upon trout that swim; Fresh-firecoal chestnut-falls; finches' wings; Landscape plotted and pieced-fold, fallow, and plough; And all trades, their gear and tackle and trim. All things counter, original, spare, strange; Whatever is fickle freckled (who knows how?) With swift, slow; sweet, sour; dazzle, dim; He fathers-forth whose beauty is past change: Praise Him. Gerard Manley Hopkins

I think that I shall never see A poem lovely as a tree. A tree whose hungry mouth is prest; Against the earth's sweet flowing breast; A tree that looks at God all day, And lifts her leafy arms to pray; A tree that may in Summer wear a nest of robins in her hair, Upon whose bosom snow has lain, Who intimately lives with rain. Poems are made by fools like me But only God can make a tree.                                   Joyce Kilmer

Nestled into the rocks under the The Mogollon Rim,  is this unique one-of-a-kind retreat we call The Tree House.  Built in 1974 by sawmill owner Austin Myer, old growth Ponderosa Pines from atop the Rim yielded up their timbers and boards to become, for our time, a place of wonder.