Sharper image.

You're so clever and yes, you're exactly right. Posting my Princess Tourist photos from yesterday doesn't help you get to know me any better, now does it?

In all honesty, I think I've told you a lot. Seven years of uncensored emotional magnetic resonance images from my brain and you don't think you know enough? You're like Ruth if she's given five squares of chocolate. If there is a sixth square still in the package, she wants it and she won't stop complaining and begging until she gets it.

For the record, she never gets it. Once I say no, I keep to no. That's what good parents do. Follow through. So readers, whatever you are looking for, if I haven't already shared it then please stop holding your breath and fill your lungs now.

There. That's better, isn't it?

Some times you just have to take what you are given.

In other news, we gave the children Swiss army knives. Not because we are foolish but because all talk over here is always Lord of the Flies, Peter Pan and The Hunger Games, and so since I was gifted my first jack knife (Oh, such a veritable tomboy child I was, since I wanted to be a boy, briefly) around this age it seemed fitting to pass that sort of incredible adventure and power on to the children. After a long and detailed briefing on proper storage, use and what not to do, I sent them out to the backyard to look for fallen wood. They are now, as we speak, out there whittling magic wands for themselves, completely unsupervised.

(I'm sure by the end of this week they'll have lost their new treasures when they try to pull a knife to sort out a playground dispute but so far so good, you know?)

All the boys are geeking out on this. It's awesome.

You want to know more about me, then know that yes, I still take awful photographs.

Now, for my day, since doesn't everyone spend Tuesdays in the woods?

The very first thing about today is that we set out to explore, and explore we did. We turned down roads and followed signs to places I normally wouldn't venture without some spare bravery and we did it with enthusiasm! Say hi to the chief. The second thing about today is bears! Bears everywhere! In the neighborhood overnight, and in Callaghan Lake today. Three bears eating blueberries along the road. More if we had looked. Apparently there are grizzlies and cougars and mountain goats and moose there too! I was happy we were only surprised by the black and brown bears. We stuck to the highway and they stuck to the treeline, and everyone was happy. That park is just CRAZY nature. And yes, I brought my handbag. And Ben took this picture, since he was closer. I was busy screaming and shit.

The third thing about today was that Whistler was incredibly lackluster this afternoon. Arrive early in the day if you want to do alot, otherwise you will be shopping, drinking coffee and people-watching. Which isn't as fun in Whistler as it is on Robson Street.

The fourth thing about today is that Brandywine Falls is a whole hell of a lot more cohesive than it was twenty years ago as well. Back then it was a path off the highway. A sketchy one! Now it has walking trails and lookoff opportunities and ample parking. And a sign-story. And washrooms. What the fuck, progress, can't you leave anything alone? On the upside, it was easy to find and not sketchy. Big huge plusses when you are exploring British Columbia.

The fifth thing is Trolls Chowder. They brought me a bowl as big as my head and I ate all of it before Ben was even halfway through his. So delicious. It's becoming a thing, me and Trolls.

The view from my favorite booth. Almost home, princess.

The final interesting thing about today is that when we arrived home, a good ten, eleven hours after venturing out, I was grateful to be home. Happy to be safe in our warm, softly-lit, inviting home. I haven't had that feeling in this house before. Such an amazingly good feeling at that. It's about time.

Dance card full.

A tiny crown for a tiny princess, he said, as he put the ring on my finger. I haven't taken it off since.

Best. Weekend. Ever.

I'm going to just go ahead and concede defeat now. The weekend has kicked my ass and I keep turning and walking straight into Ben's shirt for a brief dark snooze in the black jersey and then I'm turned back out in short order because he is doing things and he will meet me later for sleep.

(If he stops singing the songs from Rango. JESUS. DUCT TAPE IS IMMINENT.)

I spent half the day in the vineyard and the other half at the lake. You know what's cool about the lake now? I can stay on shore and watch the kids swim for hours without having to be right there because they can swim very well now. You know what's not cool about the lake? The kids are still only 12 and 10 and I need to watch them every single second. It's about as relaxing as playing singles tennis. AKA It isn't. I came home fried and overheated and all jacked out on nerves.

I came home to my kickass vineyard which is finally under control and the buds are starting to plump up nicely. I need to put the nets up still but otherwise we are go for fruit. And wine!! Yay! This is all I need, more wine. Dear God, please, no more wine. I think this is quite enough.

I am also worn out from the carnival yesterday, from standing up too long, from too much sugar and too much sun, not enough sleep, endless cooking and apparently I didn't get the memo. Ben did and he read it out loud. It said:

Dear Bridget,

You are not twenty anymore. You can't run on three hours sleep and a ton of work and too much sun and all this bad food and alcohol and nonstop action.

Love, your former self, who totally could and still does run on air.

OMG. She is such a bitch and I hate her.

Goodnight. I am tiny toast, burnt and done and done and eaten. Snort.

Eight arms to hold you.

Around and around and around we go.

This I can manage.

Late in the evening on a weekday the trucks roll in, slowly down the highway, a caravan of freaks with the best manners you have ever seen, a quiet spectacle in the growing darkness. Everyone is busy with midweek jobs, errands and chores and quietly a field becomes a parking lot and a parking lot becomes a carnival, rides are assembled and rode until tested to be safe. Checklists are checked, recited and signed off on. Permits are obtained and with seventy percent complete, the signs go up.

Through the waning warmth of the week's end, the trailers are set up and lights are strung across the top edge of each roof or on poles, depending on the site. Locals are hired to cover traffic, first aid and dining clean up. Now the real work begins. Pull in the people, the midway is here! Make their dollars count, make 'em spend, make them keep riding long after they've said they should stop. Keep the fun flowing until the sun goes down and the music cues on the mainstage. Pass in your report to the safety coordinator when the rides shut down at ten and then fall into bed, dirty and exhausted, content.

The carnies have arrived.

No, I am not letting them stay in the house (because I only know a few of them, two of the older ones are the ones who gave Lochlan his start once upon a time) but here in the house we have double-bunked PJ and New-Jake in with Dalton and Duncan respectively and our guests have full use of the boathouse for the next three days until pack out Monday morning which gives them a break from the trailers which are smaller than we'd ever admit out loud. The guys are loving this. Sam has a few of them as well. The shower will run endlessly and the kitchen here will be pressed into hard service until they leave. I sent the boys grocery shopping for the crew. If they are anything like we were, fresh bakery items, fruit, veggies and seafood will be what pleases them most for those were the hardest items to find on the road.

Everything else is gravy. Yes, there's gravy too. I think there is, anyway. I have reminded them repeatedly that they can let me know if they need or want for anything, and they were grateful to the point of thanking me repeatedly, calling me Miss Bridget, which is sort of funny and kind of insulting and reminiscent of the scary men Jake employed at the church on the Prairie. These ones did not believe that I used to do this for a living until Lochlan confirmed, and then they were impressed because I am so delicate and sweet we functioned within both with the full-on circus and with the midway too. Lochlan is now teaching several how to throw fire and I've been cooking since dawn, it seems. Ben is highly entertained and I do believe the children are prepared to pack their bags and join the tour when it leaves town. I'll be watching to be sure that doesn't happen.

Yet.

When they're a little older they can decide for themselves. Pot, kettle, black, yes, don't I know it. But it's still a nice reprieve from the war between Satan and Batman so we will live vicariously through these wild boys for the weekend and then send them on their merry way. Great fun! If you go, get a wrist bracelet for unlimited rides. Tickets are like water out there. They flow right through your fingers and suddenly you thirst for more.

Speaking of thirst, I am making tea for twenty five. It's taking a long time, I am doing it in shifts. Never in a billion years would I want to cook daily for a crowd of hungry, unruly boys-oh wait, nevermind. Kind of shot myself in the foot right there, didn't I?

Posting may be sporadic this weekend. Not only are we on the guest list so I plan to spend my entire weekend on the Octopus, but breakfast is in like eight hours so I should probably start cooking.

The indoctrination of Bridget Reilly.

My apologies for writing such weirdly dramatic and accusatory blog entries late at night. Clearly I can build a mountain out of a molehill faster than most of you can sneeze.

Batman is trying to help and he's doing what everyone does when they want me to move on something, they give me a time limit. You know, since it worked for Jake and all.

Only Jake was such a pushover, he gave me a decade and with three days left and time running out I fulfilled his request. I haven't quite managed to meet a deadline since, however and that's sort of weird and really not surprising at all if you knew me and Caleb insists he isn't afraid of Batman in the least and perhaps they hold equal power through history, the only difference being Caleb is completely open and accessible to me and Batman is, well, he's Batman. 'Open' and 'accessible' are not options on his table at this time, or ever in the time I have known him, which is almost two decades now.

Both men requested a removal of yesterday's entry here, but I have opted to write an apology with clarification instead. I'll let it be known that I haven't changed my outlook from last night to this morning. Though instead of confirming that I've been, that we've been sold out to a greater evil maybe, it's been softened to remind me that the boys are free agents who work for whomever they please, this is simply an effort to distill their talents once again into a few new projects under a different umbrella that won't be closed so tightly around them perhaps, but outwardly nothing much will be different.

Even though it will. It already is.

***

If I'm done with the public flogging I'd like to move on to a new topic this afternoon. The one about the girl who went deep into the woods halfway up a mountain and came out alive.

No drama, just a wrong turn on a long trail and we were knee-deep in mud and panic. Well, I was. Ben was FINE because he could hear the lake and the traffic and whatever stupid navigational angels whispering in his ear that I didn't come with. My navigational skills are legendary, beginning with parking my car at a shopping center in Halifax and walking away from it and instantly forgetting where I parked, therefore spending an extra forty-five minutes walking the lots hitting the emergency button on my car keys until my car beeped at me at last, to that time I blithely jumped into the car to drive downtown to meet Ben for the first time after moving here and after two hours of driving around...um...lower Delta I finally made a teary call to Ben to ask where I was because I had set off without a map or a GPS. My bravery is not of the intelligent sort, in any case.

(I have a GPS now. I call her Moneypenny and she's a bit of a snippy bitch.)

Ben can be like Cole in these situations. He just knows certain things and he knows when he's not in over his head. He's a fixer of a different sort. His cockiness is less dark and perfect and more comical. We lived because you can't die on a two-kilometer trail that runs around a lake. Because even if you get lost, the lake is right there and you can sort out a path and eventually just barge out of the thrushes or you could turn around and take the trail back or hell, Bridget, you could just jump into the water and swim to the dock. Just like you used to when they didn't hear you but you needed to be close to them anyway. Even though you're a terrible swimmer and a worse navigator and maybe a bad judge of character too.

There, there. These are their jobs anyway. You have other functions in life, things you excel at, things you were born to do. Things that cannot be bought or sold but can only be given freely. Your redemption comes at different cost, in a currency that no one else would ever recognize save for the fact that they robbed the bank and now you're trading on good graces and serendipity alike.

Like a path through the woods. It should seem obvious, except when it isn't.

I've lost sight of who is safe and who isn't.

Neither Caleb nor Batman ever sleep. I truly think that while the rest of us are naked and drooling, facedown in the sheets, these two are on the phone setting up deals overseas, with those for whom the times zones vary wildly. I daresay I can count on two hands the times I have encountered one or the other actually released from a wakeful state and yes, it was as disconcerting as you would imagine. I would tell you a horrifying story about the first thought that entered my mind upon finding Caleb with his guard down. I believe it may have involved a weapon of some kind but no, I'm not going to put it on the Internet and besides, thought crimes are not crimes per se so just nevermind. You can't indict me for wishing.

But real events are real, sadly and this morning I am overseeing the replacement of an entire wall of glass in Caleb's office because in case you missed the earthquake this morning, there wasn't one, it was Satan THROWING a table at Batman, who ducked and the table went crashing into the windows which aren't actually windows but walls made of glass that aren't supposed to be breakable. The table was sticking out of the glass when I arrived, a web of cracks stretching twenty feet on either side. No worries, I am not alone and the momentary lack of control has been replaced with Satan's usual droning hum of malevolence in an undercurrent just below the surface.

He shot his cuffs and morphed back into James Bond. It's a practiced talent. Under the dress shirt is his other form. A psychopathic nightmare. As long as he's wearing a suit we're safe. This morning? Armani, I think. When Batman arrived I am guessing Caleb was still in a black t-shirt and his shorts from a cloudy early run. The operative reminder here today would be to note that you wait until he's in the suit to be confrontational. That much I have learned anew over the past five years.

Batman isn't going to wait for Caleb to be less dangerous, for Batman trumps everything, including the devil. This hierarchy, clearly it comes from comic books and my curses come in waves at high tide, the dangerous time of day when I can't read the letters under the sea and I don't take care or exercise caution, leaving caution to morph into risk on my behalf. No work for Bridget, no, Bridget's going to be difficult.

And so the allegiance shifts once more and the power moves with it and Batman becomes the one we answer to because I was sold out. SOLD OUT.

They stopped working for Caleb in order to work for Batman.

Why didn't you tell me?

I could ask you the same thing. Do you remember our conversation from December?

Sure. You told me to fish or cut bait.

Batman smiled tightly but didn't flinch. He isn't unsophisticated enough to be rattled by my bluntness. Or by my beauty, sadly. I have no aces up my sleeves. I don't even have sleeves in this dress, for crying out loud. I have nothing, not my flesh, not my soul, not my heart, I am a doll. My eyes are sewn on and my dress is stitched to my plastic frame. I will sit in the corner and stare until played with, you can call me any name you want and I will never look back at you with accusatory eyes, just my customary I-didn't-hear-you blank expressionless pretty face.

I said I would give you weeks and I gave you months and you haven't made a move to put him in his place.

Why didn't you tell me you talked the boys into working for you?

They're not working for me. What are you talking about?

You own everything they're starting in.

I catch him off guard but then his face breaks into a huge grin.

You're not easily fooled.

I must look so incredibly stupid to all of you, you don't give me credit for a damned thing.

We give you credit for your strength.

It isn't strength, you idiot, it's endurance. It's patience. It's a pain threshold beyond anything you have ever even imagined.

The grin is gone. Away to be burned off by the sun. I hit the mark. Batman's been a safe haven of a different sort. His offers of help were so final and frightening, his power a little too great. I've never really believed that he was a man, he seemed to be more of a superhero, someone who held great power, someone who would only help you when you had nowhere else left to turn and as bad as things were, I still lined the boys up in order and Batman was always last. I put space between us on purpose and so he was last.

Last. This race is a joke, I'd rather come up slow through the populated portions of this race to watch the people in the park play chess on those giant human-sized boards, schlepping their rooks about the squares on a bright sunny day, not caring for the outcome of the game, just for the sake of play.

Running without watching where I'm going never ends well, now, does it? When I don't look where I'm going I have a tendency to trip and fall and hurt myself and this time, it goes as well as expected.

You've changed the subject. The point is, I gave you a time limit, and your time is up, Bridget.

Like hell it is, I say, and I step back into the elevator, letting the doors close in his face. Caleb didn't throw the table because he was angry, he threw it because he was scared. That's when you lose control the most. When you are unequivocally afraid.

Brass tacks and rings too.

I can't hear you breathing
I can't hear you leading
More than just a feeling
More than just a feeling
I can't feel you reaching
Pushing through the ceiling
Till the final healing
I'm looking for you

Until the sea of glass we meet
At last completed and complete
Where tide and tear and pain subside
And laughter drinks them dry
I'll be waiting
Anticipating
All that I aim for
What I was made for
With every heartbeat
All of my blood bleeds
Running inside me
Looking for you

I am watching his hands as he sits forward, elbows on knees on the step, fingers loosely wrapped around the wine glass, curls low over his eyes, not watching the ocean but instead focused out on nothing in particular, unchecked expression staring bitterly into what remains in the bottom. In the grass. Into thin air. In the back of his own mind. Into nothing at all or maybe so deep he wouldn't be able to describe it adequately if asked, as a fault and fatal flaw in all of us, not having the words when they are needed most.

Not even remotely a flaw in one's ability to describe a moment or a feeling but a nod to how big that moment is and how inadequate the words become overall.

His hand is healing at last. Third cast is off as of yesterday and he is favoring it slightly today but you wouldn't notice if you watched him. I notice because I've known him forever, and I also was the one to drag him back each time to have a new cast put on when he would cut himself out of the previous one, sit through the lecture and promise to keep an eye on him and help him enough to not mind it so much, but if you knew Lochlan he is single-minded and low on patience as a rule. At least he looks like himself again. His lip healed, his eyebrow grew back, and he doesn't resemble a prizefighter so much as the busker that is hard to forget, quick with the charm, as always.

He has also shaved off the beard, and I am left cold against his cheek, hands up under the curls that spill across his shoulders. Summer hair. Lochlan can only be convinced once or twice a year to cut his hair and the rest of the time he lets it grow into unbelievable round bouncy curls and it's sort of funny and amazing and beautiful too. If I had hair like that I would never ever cut it. And I wouldn't listen to anyone either. I would sit on the step and drink my wine and watch the sun fall into the sea and I would swear if you came too close but wish for change and I would go to bed silent and sullen and warm.

He puts his hand out long enough to take mine and then he tucks it back up under his arm, against his chest, pulling me in tight beside him. I am shivering slightly. It's grown cold outdoors but he does not feel it yet.

Watch the skies, peanut, he instructs and dutifully I look up, following the angle of his chin so that I can see what I'm supposed to. The stars are beginning to light up, one at a time. The hues play from purple to gold to orange. He's no longer looking at the skies now, he is staring at me. I keep looking up and he presses his forehead against my hair, pushing against my head. I push back slightly. Reassurance. Stability. I am the one who makes them feel safe when it's supposed to be the other way around. My breath catches in my throat, a lump that chokes me up and I can't breathe so I sit, still as a mouse and just as quiet.

Finally I realize I am holding my breath long after I win back control of the sudden sadness and I let it all out in a shaky exhale. This is not lost on Lochlan, who releases my hand slowly and moves away with a final kiss on my hair. He stands up and pulls me up with him, into his good arm, the place one will always find a Bridget, for a final wordless squeeze and I am shoved toward the house gently, almost imperceptibly, back toward the warmth and the light inside. Back toward my own reality, tripping out of nostalgia reluctantly and with purpose. I am not his and yet he remains mine forever. Or maybe it's the other way around. I don't know. It's dark and my brain is tired and the tears still threaten and the nights are so long. In the darkness the years dissolve. In the darkness memories spread in a film over the water, diluted, dissipating easily to return perched atop the sunrise, so we won't miss them, as if we ever could.

Coffee is always bitter and must be sweetened each morning. This is why. When we meet across the island at dawn he will take my hand and tuck it back into his and Ben will do the same and at some point I have to squirm away from both or I don't get any coffee at all.

Waxing and waning.

There's a tiny hole in the wall shop I like to stop into that happens to sell these little kits, pencil boxes stuffed with Japanese character stationery things. The last one I picked up was a pink box with fifteen different Sanrio pens/mechanical pencils, a Popsicle-shaped box filled with soap flakes for hand washing on the go, a teddy bear notebook, two Miffy key chains, a stapler, Snoopy tape, Pucca stickers, Hello Kitty stickers, a Rilakkuma case with rainbow pencil leads, sparkly little gift tags for attaching to things and a huge package of origami strips.

Which we have almost finished using up in an effort to make paper lucky/wishing stars.

They're neat too but I am ridiculously bad with instructions and very impatient. I am also short on words tonight so I'll say goodnight now. I have a late walk date with a guy, a big guy who shaved off the mutton chops this morning, in a huff because hair on his face drives him nuts. He grows the beard for me and then steels himself against the inevitable flood of brief silly disappointment when he appears clean-shaven more often than I would like. I don't really mind. I mean, I love beards but I imagine all that hair on your face must get stupidly hot and itchy after a while.

Sort of like my legs. Sometimes I forget and then the boys make cheep-chirpy noises and I make a mental note to wax them. My legs, not the boys. Silly Internets. I would wax all the boys but only from the necks down. It goes without saying and so I will say no more.

Except goodnight.