The noise-canceling husband and a ride in the clouds.

I find comfort in strange places today. In Mason Jar lights and in the freezer section at the grocery store, where I saw rows of teeny-tiny gourmet treat containers, in a new Kleenex on a pink nose and in Ben's arms, my contagious face shoved right up under his chin hard where it burns and where I am complete in blocking everything else out. Sigh.

Yeah.

I managed to either win back some sort of bonus round with the stupid fucking cold I had two weeks ago or it's holding onto me for dear life. I guess I know how it feels. Am now on a hideous poison cocktail of ginseng, zinc, vitamin C, etc. etc. etc. and copious amounts of tea, vitamin water and very good leftover Chinese food.

In other news, the exhibition here (permanent which means ANY TIME WE WANT) is getting a Star Flyer.

A freaking Star Flyer!

It's like the icing on the best cake I've ever had.

There is a stack of brochures on his desk and all I have to do is pick one and bring it to him and he will make the arrangements.

There is a bowl of sliced melon in the fridge, and half a magnum of champagne, which will be thrown out rather than finished. A large container of yogurt and a basket of strawberries remain untouched on the top shelf. My stomach growls with hunger but my brain misses the cue.

Fresh flowers are everywhere. In the bathrooms. The credenza by his desk. The island in the kitchen and also in the entryway. Those had to be moved and rearranged because they were huge and the spray ended at eye level with me and I feared I might lose my vision. I didn't say anything, he noticed and had it changed.

I was given a key. I already had a key. He is clearly unprepared for the proximity and unnerved by my total compliance.

He dismisses the small neatly print-labeled bottles on his vanity with excuses I know to be lies and I accept them with distraction. This is not a comfortable place to be, in the realization that someone who held so much power is prepared to release me. The white flag flaps violent against the glass and I can only watch it because I don't know if it's real or just one of those things my imagination puts into place to help me understand things that my mind knows but my heart simply can't manage.

There is a difference and it is stark. To me at least.

He is amused by my hands. Rings sliding loosely over my knuckles, my fingers flutter a never-ending ode in air piano. Fidgeting, counting beads on the bracelet I wear, tapping on the table, pulling wayward strands of blonde out of my lip gloss, which attracts my hair like static cling, fascinating him to the point where he sits motionless in a low chair by the window, bourbon in hand, watching me move. Watching my nervous motions. Checking for the holes through which he will reveal my deception or my conviction.

I offer none of either. I am waiting him out.

I can bend him a little and he bends me back. I give up and he moves in to suggest decadence. I pretend to take it for granted and he exudes clear, silent exasperation. He talks to the walls and then his whole face drops when I ask him to repeat himself. He seeks perfection in my flaws as a singular and unfair definition. This is not who I am.

He held up his remorse, looking for a reflection and I gave him back cold detachment. In this light he is not who I want him to be either. This new revelation tore him apart.

I dropped my hands to my sides and turned, marching off only there is no place else to go and when I pointed that out from between gritted teeth, seething with pretend patience he made a call and twenty-minutes later I heard low rumblings in the hallway. He returned with this thick pile of choices for me, if I want them. He is the new mother and I am the inconsolable child and he does not know how to quiet my cries. He is becoming desperate.

Instead I take the flowers from the front hall and carry them outside to the balcony. My heart stops every time I step onto it, more than thirty-six stories high but that's the only coincidence I will acknowledge and I turn the vase upside down and let the water and the lilies fall. The wind does not take them. Someone on the sidewalk below will think that angels are throwing flowers at them. They would be correct.

I turn to come back inside and he is frowning. A misstep. The flowers should have simply been removed, not fixed and returned. You can't fix things when they don't work the first time. You can't make it better and you can't pretend you didn't lose an eye when clearly it's missing and the only thing left in your head is a few pretty glass marbles rolling around in your head.

He is eager to make this okay. Nothing is okay. And nothing he does is going to change that.

Would you like to go out for lunch?

Yes, I lie.

He goes to get our coats. I wonder if maybe I'll find my mind in one of the pockets. I hope so, but life holds no guarantees.

Acoustic pine.

We were seventeen markers to the end. I have always counted. I rolled my head back against the soft leather headrest, feeling his eyes on me briefly in between keeping watch on the road, I'm sure he thought I had fallen asleep but my eyes were wide open, tracking Orion, tracking little bear and the dipper too. The stars were fixed and we were in motion, on a ribbon of black lit by halogen, winding through trees lit by the moon, on a ball that spins so slowly you fail to notice until the sunrise.

I stick both arms up above my head to catch the wind and he laughs. We need Nick Drake to sing us home, I suggest and he shakes his head. We need the peace and the quiet, too, Bridget. I pout but I can play the songs in my head any time I want to, I think to myself and the music floods in, cutting off whatever I was planning to think about next.

The rest of the drive was in silence for him, just the way he likes it.

Endless spring.

We've been here for a year today. And I'm surprised at how quickly time flies and not at all surprised by how slowly I spend it. I have loved getting to know the entire West Coast and the amazing beauty that exists here that I really wasn't conscious of in my visits. It's impossible to truly appreciate how amazing a place is until you don't have to leave it to go home because it IS home.

I love the ocean. I love the giant happy-face slugs on the trees that Ben always threatens to lick. I love the pine trees and the cleanliness and the snow-capped mountains and the cold clear streams that you can rinse your hands in and not have them come away worse than when you started. I love the small-town vibe in a big city backdrop and I love how everything is simplicity demanded by a population that is heading out for a hike and doesn't want to screw around.

The rain hasn't gotten to me yet, surprisingly. The hours may have, as the boys are working harder than they've ever worked before but they're also getting more recognition than ever and they seem a little more at ease now that we are a little more settled and things are ironing out.

I even found a place to have my skates sharpened, just today. Took 3 minutes, cost five bucks.
Then I went around and around on the ice with no gloves on, sailing across the smooth surface of the frozen layers with the cheesy piped-in music drowning out our words and I tried to keep Henry upright when he was determined to keep falling and I tried to keep Ruthie happy when she got tired and hurt her knee but refused to slow down and I realized abruptly that I have certain muscles whose memories are as badly flawed as the ones in my head because they had forgotten how to skate and wow, everything is always new, but you know what?

Someday it won't be.

I really do like it here.

Nerves of Jell-O.

Lochlan has a lower-ranged Fix You queued up on the guitar this morning. I think I might have to avoid him today, too.

When you lose something you can't replace
When you love someone, but it goes to waste
Could it be worse?

I was a slow convert to Coldplay, and while I've barely grazed the surface of their catalogue, I still maintain my position that Lochlan finds his music the same way I do, picking and choosing from among the most profound of lyrics or melodies to augment his emotional release, whatever it may be.

I don't know why that is, I'm guessing it's nurture over nature, as it would make sense that the one who taught me to embrace the music this way would do it as well. And I don't mean to be so grumpy lately. I miss my horses. I miss the beach because I haven't been down in a while. I think I miss new Jake just enough to make everyone vaguely angry and I'm angry at Caleb for forcing this weird formal parenting arrangement on me when what the mediators and the judge can't see is his position standing on my back. I am face down in a puddle of dirty water and I can't breathe because he won't let me up. I miss Ben most of all. Ben works a lot. Madness in artistry, artistry in madness, we have it all covered up here under a canopy of rain-soaked trees.

I get stressed and I start to pick on everything and everyone. I lash out and I'll try not to. That's all I can promise. I will try not to. I won't back down but I'll attempt to look at things from your perspective and you can look at them from mine.

My patience with just about everything was flung off a roof and then with epic, mistaken regret, Jacob chased it all the way down to street level. And I'm very sorry but I didn't have any in reserves and I have forgotten the recipe to make more.

Lochlan can thaw me out with this beautiful song (one of so many and I am only thankful today for the health of my children and the music that people have created that I can still hear) and I will be here if you need me but you don't, because the world turns in perfect circles whether I am leaning into the curve or not.

Tears stream down your face
I promise you I will learn from my mistakes

Sweet little hypocrites.

I am sitting on the edge of a long couch in a Vietnamese nail salon near the edge of nowhere downtown patiently waiting for Caleb to finish with his metrosexual grooming errands. He is getting a manicure in which they do little more than file a few ragged edges and buff and then collect a hundred dollars from him. Four times I have refused to be umm...treated so instead I am listening to the women who are waiting for their appointments as they seem to arrive in groups and I am getting an earful.

They have all decided Caleb is exceedingly hot and then helpfully the shop owner whispered something at the largest group and then pointed to me and a sea of falsely-tanned, overly-streaked blinged-out blondes gave me their heavily-practiced 'disappointment' faces. One of them mouths She's so LUCKY! to her friend.

Oh, girls. If only you knew.

But I did not correct them out loud. I will let them live in their bubbles. I haven't opened my mouth short of asking Caleb directly how long he would be and he responded that I may as well sit down for a moment but don't leave. Fine.

The tanned girls are reading celebrity magazines and discussing other nail salons. They are complaining about the place that ran out of the right color and the one where the water for the pedicures wasn't warm enough and at another place the horror was in having to wait ten minutes past her appointment time and her time is valuable, she had tanning afterward and it got messed up and she had to reschedule for fifteen minutes later. Yet another was downright PISSED because her nail technician got up once to answer the phone and it took two extra minutes to have her polish finished but she didn't get a discount after all that trauma. Still another won't go to her favorite former haunt anymore because their Sex and the City reruns are 'annoying'.

If he takes much longer I might slip off the end of the couch into sheer stupification, perhaps to rock myself back and forth and I remind myself this is why I don't have girlfriends (other than the obvious glaring reasons). Because I will go buy a bottle of pretty color and paint my own nails a hundred times for $3.99 and it takes very little time (Sally Hansen Insta-Dry) and then I have nothing to complain about and no one's going to take my hundred dollars only to make me wait five minutes or force me to endure dumb television shows and gossip magazines. And....tepid water.

I consider that very good value. I just don't understand how you can be so spoiled as to pay someone to regularly paint your nails and then have the nerve to complain that you weren't pampered enough.

I really hope he's finished soon though. I really fear I might punch somebody in the face.

Let me get some things straight.

-Yes, we did see the supermoon last night from the back deck! It came up right over the trees by the road and rose higher and higher and turned paler and it became cold so we gave up around ten. The geese were coming home at the same time, flying in the dark, honking softly. It was beautiful and funny, I thought they were on the roof. The telescope is still taking up most of the back entryway. Something tells me there is more stargazing in our future, now that Ben has had time to tinker with the bolts on it and get it set up just right.

-I realize Ben needs a haircut. Thank you for pointing that out. He's been very busy. However my main goal is to get him in the woods today because for some reason that has turned out to be total and utter decompression for us as a family and we love it. I'm pretty sure the bears love it too, and as we walk by they most likely take inventory: blonde meat, blonde meat, blonde meat, metal meat OM NOM NOM.

-The Lululemon bug has hit me. I don't really like the clothes but I'm dying to know what my ass would look like in those famous Groove pants. It will be a spectator sport too, since everyone else is wondering as well. But really, I can't justify $98 for a pair of yoga pants. Ones that pill, according to the reviews because I wouldn't be washing them separately. I won't buy anything I can't chuck in the washer along with everything else, though I'm fine with drying things in special snowflake ways. So fail but the curiosity remains.

-I finally figured out the #^@%@*# goshdarned fucking curtain tracks. They're I-beam single tracks for pinch-pleated valances. Which means I can either buy the little sliding eyes to put hooks through or see if I can find where to buy the curtains that have the plastic track-sliders sewn right on. You know what? Never mind. You know how long it takes me to cover all the windows in a new house and I'd really like to work with the hardware that is already installed if I can. Yeah...never mind. I need to go to IKEA but I can't seem to drive there by myself.

-Stop with the baby rumors. They don't hurt or anything, they're just so pointless and baseless. I am done. I've been done since 2001 if you want to be truly technical. It's great to get up late on a Sunday morning and find your children in the kitchen making themselves hot breakfasts. Ruth shuns juice this morning and I know I don't have to care because they eat well and I have to know draw on my recall powers, remembering what it felt like to be twelve. We all know I remember exactly what it feels like to be twelve.

-Ben and I are plotting a road trip. I'm excited. It may not for a while but we are developing some grand plans to drive to San Diego and back again. I haven't been so excited about an idea since forever. We just have to save our gas money up first. No, really, we do. Haha. $1.47 a litre!

-I think I screwed myself with this English toffee syrup in my coffee. I'll probably never be able to drink coffee without it ever again. Thank you Daniel, I think, or maybe curse you, Daniel. I had black coffee in a styrofoam cup at a roadside truckstop down to a science and now I'm all high-maintenance again. Pfft.

-I'm going to go enjoy my Sunday now. See ya. Have a good day.

Supermoon.

Ben is playing his guitar. He's sitting at the table while the children finish their dinner and he's playing from memory, his head thrown back, eyes closed. He's taking a nap. Such is life here. Soon he'll be played out and he'll move to a more comfortable chair and he'll motion for me to join him and I'll run and curl up in his arms and fall asleep with my head on his heartbeat. When I wake up at sunrise he will sleep on for hours still.

These precious moments are like oxygen when we have been drowning in waves of obligation.

More distracting things for both of us.

It's the last day of winter. Next week we'll celebrate our first full year of living here on the west coast and I plan to celebrate, because it's been a year of adjustments and more courage and more growth overall, learning how to put myself out there and meet some people and get what I need and find a little familiarity in the face of all things new. More on that next week, not today.

Some winter it was, too. It snowed precisely four times, the last of which caught us downtown on Davie street with a bus sliding backward toward my little car. We turned off into an alley and made our way out of downtown easily with the snow tires no one here seems to own because...well, it only snows four times a year.

In January I wore a hoodie to walk the dog, mostly. I think I put on gloves twice. My ears froze once and the power went out three times, all for less than the time it took me to get annoyed and pull out the lanterns. I opened the windows every single day for a couple of hours, in every room to air out the entire house. When I do I can hear the birds singing. That's how close we are. That's how loud they are.

The ivy never turned brown in the garden. The snowdrops were blooming on Valentine's day. The grass remained green and Bridget learned that perhaps, just maybe, she might never have to put up with winter again.

But I will still welcome the first day of spring tomorrow, for spring brings Easter and maybe just shirts instead of sweaters buttoned up high and maybe the windows can stay open in my bedroom while I sleep and maybe I can start planning for a few more plants to try from the nursery because the ones we have aren't going to cut it.

I can look forward to late nights on the verandah with beer and guitars or maybe just guitars and swimming will start again for the kids and everyone will get excited about fishing up at Camp Crystal lake (my name for it) and boy, I want to go there at night just to see, but the gates are closed at dusk and I have no interest in walking in, thank you.

The big bears and the cougars will return for another run at our garbage cans and soon the blackberries will bloom and fill in the bare patches from the past four months, competing with the cherry blossoms and filling the whole mainland with a riot of pink confetti set against an endless blue ocean sky.

And then what happens?

Oh, yeah. Summer! I can't wait.

A diaphanous cheer (under my breath).

Yesterday didn't turn out nearly as fun as I had hoped. I watched five proposals and only cried through the most recent one (Brad and...Emily? who have already broken up, as is tradition for the Bachelor series and this is why I hate television) and then a call came that said I had an appointment downtown and it was for three. Three. So...in three hours? Yes.

SHIT.

And DRUNK.

Eleven cups of coffee later and a giant danish and Andrew brushed my hair while I waved him away and I was off with a run in my stockings, a pinstripe suitdress (TIGHT. ARGH.) and my kitten heels because newly-soberish is no way to wear stilettos.

I met Ben in the lobby. He laughed and said sorry for ruining my grand plans. I felt dumb for having such ridiculous plans in the first place but he is working around the clock and we are wasting time as fast as we can.

Yes, so anyway. The meeting went very well and then all of it turned out to be for naught this morning when Caleb found another way around me, as usual. While I am busy charming the front lines and melting hearts with my vulnerability, Caleb is chewing the skin off my back, exposing raw nerve endings to string up and pull tightly into bows until I scream with rage and pain.

(Why, yes, we have a very cordial relationship. Why do you ask?)

In any event, we will do what we need to do and get where we're going and muddle through like we always do. Plans are still in place (aka can't talk), Ben is still spending every waking hour trying to find a way around some things that seem to be carved in stone but may have been spray-painted on after all, and I have a tiny ace up my sleeve in that one of the horses Caleb sold did not belong to him and so boy is he in trouble and he's going to have to answer to Nolan for that.

And Nolan thinks all of this is bullshit as it is, he has no time for Caleb's rich-man games of cat and mouse and he wishes Jake was still alive because Jake did pretty well at deflecting Caleb and I know Caleb was afraid of Jacob in a way he should be of Ben, but isn't. Why? He's already been inside Ben's head and he knows where the weak spots are. There aren't very many but the ones that exist are profound and frightening and wouldn't you know Caleb would exploit them to get to me. Only I won't have that and so I give Caleb whatever he wants and he'll leave Ben alone. He'll leave Lochlan alone.

Oh, he won't leave me alone, though. In case you thought I would write that next.

Nope. You see, when Cole died I didn't do the one thing Caleb thought I would. I didn't cancel my plans to get on with my life. Caleb expected me to stop moving forward and hunker down and take solace in the fact that I was still irrevocably tied to Cole, that the fact that we hadn't actually managed to start divorce proceedings yet would give me comfort and I would spend the rest of my life taking Caleb's guidance and deferring to him, as things should be.

And I didn't. Boy, didn't I EVER.

I didn't give him the time to move in and take over and somehow fix the past and engineer my future on my behalf and well, Jesus H. Gotta pay for that now too.