CHAPTER SIX

The bus lumbered through the slush and labored over the mountains to a fading Highline town where we were booked to play a quaintly shabby old opera house. 

The guy at the box office immediately pegged me as a party girl who'd been up all night and invited me to go to the bar next door for a hair of the dog before the show, but I could not for the life of me remember why that used to sound like fun.

Later that evening, as I did my shtick out on the foot-lit stage, I heard the bear's distinctive baritone laughter from somewhere in the audience. 

After the show, he was waiting for me by the door. I didn't bother asking him how he'd gotten there.

He didn't bother asking me where I wanted to go.

I can't endorse the idea of love at first sight, but maybe there are moments when God or fate or some cosmic sense of humor rolls its eyes at two stammering human hearts and says, "Oh, for crying out loud."

I married the bear a few months later in a meadow above his tiny cabin in the Bridger Mountains.

We weren't exempted from any of the hard work a long marriage demands, but for better or worse, in sickness and in health, that moment of unguarded, chinook-blown folly has somehow lasted 30 years.

We laugh. We read. I do dishes; he bakes bread. Every morning, we work through the daily crossword puzzle.

Our daughter, Jerusha, and son, Malachi Blackstone (named after his great-grandfather and an island in Chesapeake Bay) tell us we are agonizingly dull.