"I married Isis on the fifth day of May, / But I could not hold on to her very long. / So I cut off my hair and I rode straight away / For the wild unknown country where I could not go wrong. ... Isis, oh, Isis, you're a mystical child. / What drives me to you is what drives me insane. / I still can remember the way that you smiled / On the fifth day of May in the drizzlin' rain."

-- Bob Dylan, Isis

I was flipping through Sophie's journal she has to keep in language arts class, cleaning out her book bag from the school year, when I came across this entry and it made me chuckle. I've kept the penmanship and spelling errors because I thought they were cute.

"If I could go anywhere I wanted, I would go to Alaska. I would go to Alaska to sled trained dogs. I would sleep in a caban with my dogs. My dogs names are Maindy, Foxy and Jack. My family would ski cross country and I will have fun. We would build an igloo. Then we would go back to the caban for a good night sleep. This is where I would go if I could go anywhere I wanted."

Below this entry she's drawn a picture of a cabin. Above the picture, she wrote "A pictar of my caban" and beside it some straw is drawn with arrows pointing down and she wrote "were (should be where) dogs sleep. Hay."

A girl after my own heart! Clearly, she was conceived in a cabin in Wyoming in Teton National Forest on the grounds of Frank Teasley's place and the Jackson Hole Iditarod Sleddog tours? :-)

It's been a long time comin'

but it's well worth the wait...or maybe not.

Chris is getting ready to leave for Italy. I'm relieved. I like having the house to myself, even though things are chaotic here. I want a new life. I do not want what I have. How does this happen? Suddenly I'm stuck in suburbia with the 2.5 kids, two cars, the mortgage, the career...how did I get here? Like the Talking Heads song, letting the days go by...

I think often of getting in my truck and driving and not coming back for a long time. I think of the question I often used to pose to smokers at the bedside counseling session: if money and other things holding you back were not an issue, what would you do? If money were not an issue, I would be divorced. I would build a cabin in the woods in a place where stars burn brighter than neon, where the smell of pine and cedar wafts through the breeze singing down the mountains, where trout and salmon jump, where I could have my kennel and raise my kids without fear.

My 3 year old will not go to bed. She is singing next to me on the couch as I type, a song about going to sleep with the stars and the moon. She tells the stars, "I love you, good night, friends, good night."