It's cold and wet here in Troll Valley. It's beautiful and suits my mood perfectly. I got in to Banff yesterday after a long flight full of sneezing and wheezing children. Summer's begun in the airline business. A little boy sitting behind me who was obviously experiencing his first flight screamed out to his mom on takeoff "This is crazy! This is CRAZY!" Yeah!

I got to spend the afternoon with three of my adorable nieces. Getting lost in their playful chatter kept my mind busy. Taylor is thirteen now, and full of secrets and hormones. She reminds me of me at her age. In fact, she reminds me of me at my age. I still feel thirteen.

I had dinner with Pat, my long time friend from Banff who helped me when I needed a hand getting out of my marriage and the vegetarian restaurant I burned myself out on here in the land of beef eaters. She is kind and generous to a fault and is now sleeping on a mattress on the floor in her mom's apartment because she rented out her own for the summer to help pay the mortgage and she moved her bed into the condo of the man to whom I was married so he can rent it furnished. Now she's trying to find a condo in Calgary to buy for her brother who's a low-income earner. She can't in good conscience live her jet-setting lifestyle and let him exist without a proper home. That's Pat. Thinking of everyone first before herself. One could ask for no better friend. But she's getting tired. She needs a handsome forty-five-year-old, wealthy, fit, decent, funny, compassionate, active, exciting man to take care of her. I really hope it happens for her but I fear she's become too rigid in her drive for independence.

I slept on the floor beside her on my thermarest. I was going to camp at my favorite little campground, Two Jack Lake, so I could have some privacy and nature and fresh mountain air into which to spew some more tears, but she insisted I stay under her dry roof. I'm glad she did. At three in the morning, when the bars were closed, a pile of drunken kids poured into the streets and I was jolted awake by a howling slobbering creature of the night reminding me why I came to hate Banff: "I wanna stick my penis in your vagina!!!" Yup. That's Banff. Don't stay long or you'll get sucked into the vortex...

I got up this morning and snuck out for coffee while Pat slept. On the street in front of a local breakfast joint was a metallic blue BMW 1100 with New Mexico plates. It caused me to stop in my tracks.

The most beautiful man I've ever known, a man who changed my life with a glance through a sunlit window in California five years ago, rides a metallic blue BMW 1100 and lives in Santa Fe. I knew it wasn't him, but it still caused me to stop in my tracks. I went in to say hi to the guy waving in the window. Yes, he's from Santa Fe. He just did a 1500 mile ride here in 36 hours-- an "Iron Butt Association" challenge he made for himself. "You're crazy!" I told him. He just smiled and twinkled his eyes at me. "Yup."

I've kind of lost my magic living in the city but yesterday as the plane took off and I dozed into an exhausted between-worlds state I had a vision of a spectacular bald eagle poised high in a tree, ready for take-off. I woke up when the little boy screamed "This is crazy! This is CRAZY!"