We bought our first place outside of the city in 1994. In the suburb of Chelsea, we shared our first actual house, not apartment, together, building our new life as a married couple.

Adaline spent her days at home, quilting and sewing, cooking and cleaning, and watching the lunch hour soap shows. I felt bad about leaving her alone every morning when I went to work in the city as an ad consultant, but she assured me that she was fine. She managed on her own, she said. She kept herself busy, mowing the lawn and writing poems.

At night when I would come home, she would be waiting in the tiny dining room, aside from the kitchen with a meal on the table. Adaline was never the greatest chef in the world, but I kept telling myself that food never tasted as great as hers and I came to believe that was true. After supper, we would sit down on the couch and talk about our days, watch television, and then she would retire to read in bed, and I would go to my office and work on reports and statistics that I almost always had to have ready in the morning.

The first time Adaline didn't have supper on the table when I got home was in April of '96.

"Cole, we need to talk.... This just isn't making me happy. We've lived here for two years and never made this house a home. You're gone with the sunrise and you come home in the evening only to wind up working at your house. You're making trips on weekends and meeting with clients, while I'm alone here. It's boring here, Cole, without anyone to share this with."

"We moved out of the city because it was too hectic, and now you say this is too boring? I don't get it, what is it that you want?" I was trying not to turn this into an argument, but seemed to be failing.

Adaline was my angel, I would never want to hurt her, but sometimes she just made things so god damn confusing. I couldn't tell what she wanted anymore.

"It's just,.. here isn't...This is not," she paused, because she was confusing herself. "When I married you, you promised me we would settle down, find the right place. You know, you promised me the world. You've never come through. What happened Cole? Why is our life not turning out the way we planned? I don't get it. We were supposed to be on a farm somewhere, raising a family, not in Chelsea staring at the old buildings, feeding a cat and making trips to the city. Don't you remember we were supposed to grow our own garden and live in the mountains and, oh, I don't know...all of that."

Of course I remembered, I just didn't know how to get away from everything that I had built up in New York and everything around the suburbs. I had a good job here, and I've always been one of those "If it's not broken, don't fix it" sort of people. That's when I caught that Adaline was broken and needed fixing.

I called a real estate agent in Colorado the next day. I asked about expenses and climate and what he could show me in the line of a log cabin in the mountains. None of that stuff really mattered, no matter how much it cost or how cold it was going to end up being, we were going. This is what she wanted and I was going to give it to her.

By the winter of '97, we moved in. I was uneasy at first about how she would take the move. This was clear across country, and the first time that either of us had ever really been away from the city. My nerves were settled one evening though, when I came home and saw my angel lift up her wings. I guess that this was the place, this is what she wanted, she was fixed.

I worked shorter days at an ad company in Denver, and she stayed at home and rode horses during the day, milked our cow, and collected eggs from the chickens. Supper was on the table when I got home, made from mostly homegrown things. In the spring time, every year, we planted a garden. By the next winter, we had added a new room to the cabin and a new son to the family. I had never seen Adaline as happy as when she held Noah in her arms. She's spread her wings wide open and flys as she wants to now. She tells me, flying was never allowed in the city due to other air traffic.

"Thank you," she says as we tuck Noah in and turn off the lights, "for letting me fly us out west where we belonged. Thank you for the family, thank you for the house, thank you for the mountains, thank you for loving me."