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“The beach!” Mama exclaimed, opening the door and hustling Heidi in. “You must not go to the beach alone.”

“Michèle took me,” Heidi said, holding up a shell, then turned and skipped back out the door, and Mama’s and Heidi’s minds slipped out of mine to join the realities of the day.

Pam and Paul drove up from Goddard College in a red VW bug with brakes they had to stop to bleed every fifty miles. Mama greeted Paul, who had visited the previous fall, and he introduced her to Pam through the window of the car.

Another beautiful blonde, Mama thought to herself. She noticed that all of Pam’s clothes were neatly folded in the back seat, as if she’d decided to come along at the last minute and quickly grabbed her belongings. Pam smiled at Mama, who was already slender and fit despite the tender baby on her back.

“What a great model of modern motherhood,” Pam said to Paul as they parked in the lot. The two had met a few years earlier when Pam, having just graduated from high school in Wellesley, Massachusetts, was staying at a summer boardinghouse in Ogunquit. Taken by her fresh innocence, Paul, with his dream-filled Italian eyes and dramatic way with words, soon won her heart. Paul was attending Hobart College, and Pam, William Smith, so come the fall of 1974 their relationship continued, though they found campus life lacking a variety of experience they both sought. When Paul read about our farm in the Country Journal, he wrote Papa, asking if he could come work.

“It’s magical there,” Paul told Pam upon his return. During his few months with us, he full-heartedly joined the ranks of middle-class, college-educated young people inspired to make farming a way of life. He convinced Pam to return with him to our farm the following summer.

Always good at encouraging the talents of apprentices, Papa noticed Paul’s inclination for carpentry. “Listen, there’s this big old swamp maple that’s just begging for a tree house,” Papa said, as Paul remembers it. “If you want to build something, knock yourself out, my kids would love to have a tree house, just don’t put any nails into that tree.”

Embracing the challenge, Paul and Pam set to work figuring out a Tinkertoy approach so as not to use nails. The branches of the tree made a natural palm for the floor joists, and one limb had a hollowed-out knothole, making it a logical place to sink a brace. Another branch went right through one wall and out the other, with canvas around it so it could move in the wind. In the afternoons, Heidi and I often took the little path past the pond and through the mossy woods to check on Paul’s progress.

“When will it be ready for us to come up?” we called to Paul, our necks arched back to spot him perched precariously in the growing structure.

“Someday soon,” he said. To our eager minds, that wasn’t soon enough.

In the afternoons after work, there’d be people hanging out in the campground on the stumps around the fire pit, swinging on the rope, playing guitars and harmonicas, returning from swimming at the beaches, or picking raspberries in the foundation. There were always the smells of ferns and damp bark, wood smoke and baking bread.

“Have you heard about Barry and Larry and the fireflies?” Pam was saying to the group gathered outside the cook shack. “It’s the funniest thing. They’ve never seen fireflies before, so they were chasing them around the campground last night, trying to catch them in their hands.”

Larry and Barry, bushy haired in cutoff shorts, explained that they were from California, where fireflies did not live. “I thought we’d dropped acid by mistake,” Larry said. “All these little lights blinking everywhere in the night.”

“I forgot to tell you I put some tabs in your tea,” Barry deadpanned.

“Or maybe some mushrooms?” someone suggested with a wink.

There weren’t many drugs to be had in our neck of the 1970s, as far as I can tell—though Larry did once find a patch of marijuana someone was tending in the woods. Larry and Barry were, instead, edible-mushroom-hunting