Now I'm standing in a ranch house kitchen in Silver Ridge Texas with slightly over-committed eggs and a daughter who is diplomatically lying to me about them.
I feel something that takes me a moment to identify correctly.
Content.
Genuinely, solidly, unexpectedly content.
I take my coffee to the front porch and sit in the chair that has become my chair over the past few weeks and look out at Silver Mesa waking up in the early light. The horses are moving in the far pasture.
The barn is catching the first sun on its metal roof. Remy's truck is already by the equipment shed, which means he's been here since before I got up.
Which means something either needs doing, or he found another excuse to be around when Maisie is awake because Remy has completely lost any pretense of being a grown adult around my eight-year-old.
Last Tuesday she taught him to braid.
He sat on the fence rail for forty-five minutes while she braided his hair, told him it looked good, and he believed her. Silas took a photograph. I have it saved.
The ranch is different in the morning. I know that now in a way I didn't when I first arrived. It has its own morning personality, quieter than the day, slower to start.
The light does things across the hill line that the rest of the day doesn't get. I used to lie in bed in San Francisco and stare at the ceiling and try to find a reason to get up. Now I'm on the porch before five with coffee and I don't have to look for a reason.
The reasons are everywhere.
Laney's cabin light is on.
I look at it for a moment longer than I look at anything else and feel something warm and complicated move through my chest that has nothing to do with the coffee.
We haven't made anything official. Haven't had the conversation that turns something into something. What we have is stolen moments between ranch tasks, a look across the dinner table that carries more than either of us says out loud, her hand brushing mine when she passes me tools at the fence line. Small things. Real things.
The kind of things that don't need a conversation to mean something.
Rowdy appears from around the side of the porch and drops a thoroughly destroyed rope toy at my feet with the expectant expression of an animal who considers six in the morning a completely reasonable time to start.
I look at the rope toy.
I look at Rowdy.
"I burned the eggs," I tell him. "I'm processing."
He wags his tail.
I throw the rope toy off the porch.
He brings it back immediately and drops it at my feet again with renewed enthusiasm.
I look at my coffee. Look at the rope toy. Look at the cabin light still glowing warm in the early morning.
I think this is what happy feels like.
I'd forgotten.
It feels exactly right.
The stolen moments happen in the spaces between things.
That's the only way I can describe it. Silver Mesa doesn't slow down enough for anything deliberate. There's always something that needs doing, someone who needs something, a fence that needs fixing, a horse that needs checking, or Rowdy causing a situation that requires immediate adult intervention.
So we take what we can get.
