If you like it so much why don't you live there?

Have you ever slept up a tree?

Beau Miles has. His approach was a little gnarlier than mine, hoisting a park bench into a roadside Strzelecki gum and refusing to come down – even for an interview.

My setup was less park bench, more Park Hyatt: camping mat, sleeping bag, miniature pillow and mozzie net on a wooden platform in the old pear tree at Melliodora. 

Luxury. For a time.

I’ve been wanting to spend a night in Grandmother Pear for yonks, and as the weather warmed and excuses waned I found myself hauling supplies up the treehouse ladder last Friday night.

It was a balmy end to a blistering day. Pink sky, half moon, chatty leaves. 

I lay under a tip shop mozzie net high off the ground, throwing my gaze into the canopy, feeling the breeze in my leg hair. A semi-wild princess on a plinth. 

Long billed corellas screeched and wheeled. Crickets whisked. A magpie played the flute. 

This is gonna be so peaceful and restful, I thought, curling my body beneath a belly-like protrusion in Grandmother Pear’s upper trunk. Maybe I’ll sleep out here every night.

But as the day’s eyelids drooped, the mozzies awoke to my existence. They threw themselves at the net, buzzing with bloodlust, desperate to get in. For an hour or two I was smug and they sucked eggs.

I’ll never know if it was cracks in the floorboards, a tear in the net, or rapid mosquito evolution, but somehow they ended up on the inside, trapped in an all-you-can-eat buffet of legs and arms and cheeks. 

There was nothing I could do but pull the sleeping bag around my ears and maintain a metronomic swat, haunted by the sound of tiny itchy wings beating 1000 times per second.

And as if non-consensual phlebotomy wasn’t enough, the neighbours got home around midnight and started blasting non-consensual Nickelback. 

I must’ve dozed off eventually because I awoke to ants the size of cats raining down on my head from the dreamscape. No moon, no lights, so quiet you could hear a possum blink. 

It was 3:02 in the morning, and after another hour of tossing and turning under repeated mozzie attack, I decided to call it quits on the experiment. 

Climbing down the ladder and slinking home was no walk in the park. 

Every step on the summer-dry earth cracked the dead night open; snap, thwack, crunch. I’d never felt so conspicuous. 

Spiderwebs became straight jackets as I stumbled between trees and down pathways, at last arriving home to The Dog who’d been worried sick, telling me about it with growls and yelps and barks until daybreak.

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times. But at least I gained a deeper connection with and empathy for Grandmother Pear, who has to listen to washed up soft rock every weekend and can’t run away.