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For months, a small cloud has been floating over our nine-year-old's head. "Build me a tree house," it says. At times, Matthew voices his dream out loud. We'll be sitting in lawn chairs under our favorite shade tree when he eyeballs the branches. "I could go up there and read," he tells us. "I could lower snacks down to you."

Like ooze in a sci-fi flick, the notion envelops our eleven-year-old Jacob. "I've wanted a tree house since I was three," he says. "Mom, when I have my friends in the tree house, Matthew can't come up, right?" he continues, laying the groundwork for a juicy territorial dispute.

It seems we are going to build a tree house.

Dorothy Foltz-Gray is a writer who lives in Knoxville, Tennessee.