October 23, 2021:
We drove once from Chinook into Canada, one of the very few events in either trip which included me. I arrived home with a handful of Canadian quarters and a quarter of a million Montanan mosquito bites.
There were jigsaw puzzles. There's a photo of me at a round Montanan farmhouse table, bored senseless, reaching for puzzle pieces. There were no books. She'd thought so little of what my time there would involve that she hadn't even packed two or three volumes of The Hardy Boys to keep me occupied.
I detested them, and it was mutual.
She made her choices and she meant them.