This is the afternoon of the first full day in our new home.

The sulky one is my kid, annoyed with me for capturing the moment. Three of them are triplets, who live next door, another their little brother and the other two a couple of sisters from further down Peacock Drive.

This, 24 hours after we moved in, is the life I envisioned for my son.

Joining this neighborhood has so far been surreal. The neighbors are almost comically friendly, the dramas among them that I already am beginning to discover are textbook soap opera stuff.

"You'll love them," said Pam, the only other single woman on the street, who flagged down Robby and I this evening as we rode by - he on his electric scooter, me on my bike. "Then you'll get to know them too well, and you'll wish you could get away from them. Then, you'll feel blessed to have them. Then, ya know, over and over. Mostly, you'll feel blessed."

Robby and I never finished our planned race from one end of the street to the other. A trio of teenagers were playing softball in the middle section of it. Just beyond that, a woman whose name I did not remember called out, "Hi Jane!" On our way back, Pam stopped us again and when I told her I was searching for a washer and dryer, she led me across the street to Faith and Pat's house. There, inside the garage, waiting for a buyer, was a washer and dryer, a trundle bed perfect for the guest room for which I have no furniture, a badly needed dresser and Pat, who volunteered to bring it all down and set it up for me. For $275, I have added some of serious missing pieces to our home.

Surreal. Like I said.

It began Saturday, when we took a break from unpacking to introduce ourselves to the neighbors closest, the parents of the triplets. "Hey, a bunch of the neighbors are having a kick-off to summer picnic a few doors down. "Come on down and you'll meet half the street," said Suzanne.

Robby and I found the party with no trouble. In a driveway about eight houses down, a dozen people sat in lawn chairs, most with cans of beer in their hands, some focused on plates piled high with hot dogs, chicken, pasta salad and watermelon.
Suzanne immediately brought us into the fold. "These are the new neighbors," she said.

A dozen smiles turned toward us. Introductions flew fast and furious. "Mike is with Terri, Eileen and Todd go together," the names and connections blurred in my mind. "Oh, and this is Mike and Terri's dog Ladybug. And the blonde boy, he's June and Bob's; that's Mikey. The tall one, he's Kaleb." On and on it went.

Children ranging in size from knee high to six feet swarmed in and out of the driveway, adults and kids flowing from the front of the house, through the garage, into a mysteriously hidden back yard.

Robby and I found paper plates. Someone handed me a beer, and him a juice box. We sat in folding chairs, watching more than talking.

"Hey," a woman called out. "Sue's here!"

A middle aged woman in a battery-powered wheelchair rolled up the driveway. The entire crew erupted in cheers.

"Sue has MS," Suzanne explained. "She's been in the hospital for the last month."
Women rushed to hug and kiss Sue. "Sorry I didn't come by to see you in the hospital this morning," Diana said. "But now I don't have to. I can see you here!"

Another couple walked up the driveway, the woman carrying a pan of cream-cheese-stuffed green peppers. "Hi neighbor!" one of the men shouted in greeting. "Hey there, neighbor!" the other man volleyed back. Several other people joined in, laughing and tossing "hi neighbors" back and forth among them.

While they "hi-neighbored" themselves silly, I turned to Robby.

"Who wrote this script?" I asked. Robby laughed and nodded, and I grinned even wider at the realization that he understood exactly what I had meant.

Person after person approached us to say hello. Their words were almost identical.
"You couldn't have picked a better neighborhood," they said.

Eventually, we discovered who owned the house in whose driveway we sat.

"Welcome to the Peacock Bar and Grill!" said Todd, the tall, black-haired patriarch. "We're open for the season! See," he said, pointing around a bend in the sidewalk. "We've even got an 'open' sign." And there it was, just outside their front door.

Robby, who hung back with me for the first hour, soon vanished from my side with the boy who lives next door to us. Together, they ran back home to get their bikes. I saw Robby later, surrounded by a pack of neighborhood boys.

"That's the way it goes around here," Suzanne said.

I nodded and turned my head farther than necessary to look. I didn't want her to see the happy tears in my eyes.

Several times that evening, I turned my head in just that way. And several times again yesterday, when children ran our doorbell on a regular basis and flowed comfortably from room to room with Robby. They gathered around the table to play Life. Later, they lolled on the living room floor and took turns playing with Robby's Wii system.

By afternoon's end, I thought I would cry for another reason. Almost all our apple juice, orange juice, a bottle of Coke we'd received as part of a housewarming gift, four puddings and several pieces of cold chicken I'd planned on as dinner were gone. I was overwhelmed, completely unprepared for so many children. Robby and I both breathed a sigh of relief when our house finally became ours again.

Just why, I wondered, did we both feel so undone? Looking back, I realize that we have had six years of relative solitude, just he and I alone in homes too far removed from regular gangs of children. This will be a dramatic adjustment for us both. But it is one I am confident we will happily make.

Saturday night, we were the first to leave the party. We wandered back down our new street, Robby riding slowly next to me on his bike, the same bike that has sat unused for the last year in the closet of our third-story apartment.

"What do you think?" I asked him.

"I think this'll be good," he said, unable to suppress a grin.

"Sometimes," I said, "it takes a while to get where you belong, doesn't it?"

He nodded and at his next words, had it not been such a dark night, I would have turned my head again. "This," he said, "is where we belong."

My left hand is ready, as well trained as it will ever be for the endurance test that awaits it tomorrow. Tomorrow, we close on our new home. Tomorrow, I will sign, initial, sign, initial, initial and then again sign an awesome pile of documents, as well as hand over a very big cashier's check.

Commitmentphone that it appears I am, tomorrow, I will commit myself to a house for three decades. That's almost three times longer than the average American male-female relationship -- now 11 years. You'd think I'd be a nervous wreak.

But I sit here on my bed, one of the few still intact items in this apartment, heavy with contentment. Quietly happy with the knowledge that tomorrow, my son and I start another phase in our life, this one more sustained, more ripe with promise, than so many that have come before.

It's the comfortable hum of knowing something is right. Some piece of life's puzzle clicks softly into place. And with it, the others seem close enough to touch.

Life is boxes, tape, documents and an endless series of checks.

We are moving. During the past few weeks, I have signed countless papers, assembled W2s, IRA statements, released my credit history to faceless strangers and begged, borrowed and darn near stolen to qualify for a home while my Colorado Springs townhouse remains on the market. My checkbook looks thin, beaten. Checks in two-, three- and four-figure amounts have been ripped from its paper mouth.

But money is not bothering me. All this will work out.

For the last two days, I’ve been packing. Amazing how much hides in a two-bedroom apartment in which you have lived only 11 months.

Packing is tedious. I’d forgotten how much so. But packing is not bothering me.

My son told me about two weeks ago that he hates his stepmother. Since then, with gentle prodding from me, he has admitted to more and more unrest about the life he lives in what I have always known was her home – not Robby’s or his father’s. But hers.

His sadness - this is what is bothering me.

I’d always thought we were the exceptional split family, with the rare good stepmother/son relationship. In fact, I’d been a wee bit jealous of her. While I never liked the split in parenting time, or thought the judge had made the best decision for Robby, I figured it was OK. Robby was doing well. He liked both his homes. He was loved in both.

Often, I’d suspected his dad did not provide him with enough to do. That Robby was neglected in the bustle of caring for a hobby ranch teaming with animals. I’d believed since they’d married that my ex jumped for his wife, and tended to Robby’s needs second. That my ex’s fear of being left skewed the world for him, caused him to agree to things – such as the move to an 80-acre ranch truly in the middle of nowhere – because his terror of being left again was so overwhelming.

They’d hoped Robby would like ranch life. He does not. But instead of finding new things for him to do, instead of taking him to the small library there, or arranging time for him to see his school friends, finishing the long-promised tree house or buying the long-promised trampoline, he plays video games there. He does chores. He attends school, and does his homework.

My son is not given to drama, so I believe the things he is telling me. I believe he has wanted to tell me for some time, but because he doesn’t like to rock the boat, he’s kept it inside.

I question him one night as I am tucking him into bed.

“Do you feel loved at your dad’s house?” I ask him.

He looks away from me, up at the ceiling. He makes a clucking sound with his tongue. This is what he does when he’s trying not to cry.

“Just by my dad,” he says.

“Is Sherry mean to you?”

“Yes.”

His answer shocks me.

“How?” I ask. “Has she hit you?”

I wait for the answer, coiled tight like a snake ready to strike her in the jugular if he tells me she has.

“No. She just yells at me.”

“How much?”

“A lot,” he says, clucking, eyes rolled to the ceiling, tears gleaming anyway just inside the bottom lid.

“Why?”

“I don’t know. She just does.”

“Are you happy there?” I ask.

He shrugs. “I don’t know.”

“Do you like living there?”

No answer.

“Do you like school there?”

He nods.

Finally, after a series of questions – some answered, some not – I understand that he would like to live her fulltime, but still attend his little school in which he knows and loves everyone.

“Well,” I say, wrapping up the conversation as lightly as I can. “That would be a very long bus ride, wouldn’t it?”

I cuddle him close, tell him how much I love him, how special he is, say nothing about his father or Sherry. But inside, I feel no such calm.

I think about the judge who made a decision so biased it shocked the child court advocate, who had recommended my son spend his school days, and most of his time, with me. The judge – a former city dweller turned mountain goat - said Robby did not need all the extra curricular activities of a large school, when he had the mountains at his back door.

Shocked, emotionally and financially drained, I tried to accept the verdict. Eighteen months and $10,000 had passed; I could have appealed. I chose not to.

Now, I wonder if I made the right decision.

It is this I think about as I pack. The life that could have been, should have been, for my son.

On a shelf behind his bed, I find four soccer trophies, all of them a little dusty. I dust each one, wrapping them individually in sheets of newspaper. The trophies are from Dillon and Colorado Springs. The most recent, a bobble head we both found particularly cute.

This happy character, his right leg bent in a perpetual kick, saddens me. Here is the sport Robby never will be able to fully pursue because he cannot be on an organized team. In the tiny town in which he attends school, there are no team sports. No band. No choir. No nothing. His time here is too limited, his ability to make practices too impossible.

I open his closet door and see a skateboard and helmet. This, for about four months, was his passion. But he had no one with whom to practice, no one to egg him on to bigger stunts. No one skateboards in a ranching community. Roads are gravel. Homes are at least 80 acres apart. Kids don’t gather after school. No one “hangs out.” In this apartment complex, we see almost no children. I took him to skate parks, but without a partner, his confidence waned. The skateboard vanished behind a wall of hanging clothes.

All these tiny things make my heart ache. It bleeds, an ever so thin but constant trickle, for my son.

This move, I hope, will be about healing, offering him a new life and refuge from a house controlled by a woman whose maternal instincts never grew.

According to a nonverbal agreement between his father and I, Robby will attend high school where I am. I do not trust him. So instead of hoping he’ll simply do the right thing, I will entrench my son in his new neighborhood so firmly that there will be no question. That Robby’s voice, not the judge’s, or his father’s, will this time decide his future.

Robby and I found our new neighborhood by accident, searching for access to a beautiful park we spied from a busy cross street. We found the park, then walked the neighborhood. It felt, we agreed, like home.

The children on our new street are the ones with whom he will attend high school. Before I put an offer in on the house, I checked with the state to learn the quality of the high school – Excellent. I walked the street, talking to neighbors. One after another, they told me how much they love their neighborhood. The children ignore the nearby park to play in the street, they said. The adults gather in driveways to barbecue. Dogs roam free because everyone knows them.

I made an offer that day.

A couple of my friends think I should talk to my ex about what Robby has told me. But I see no way to win with this approach. My ex and his wife both likely will resent me for it. I have asked Robby if he will talk to his father. "No," he says. And when I push some more: "I never will."

So I'll take this silent approach. In addition to all the love and support I have, I will create for him the best home possible. A place that doesn't feel like something temporary, with neighbors who don't duck their heads as they walk without speaking from car to apartment door. A place without harsh words, warm with good food and good friends.

So that when the time comes, if his father balks, Robby can say -- perhaps even without words -- where he feels best. He can finally, fulltime, come home.

Sometimes, just when you need an ego boost most, there he is.

My dog and I took a leisurely walk on the bike path last night. Everything was spring-into-summer green, the temperature balmy, the breeze gentle.

We were farther from home than usual. I needed to make a return at Wal-Mart, just around the corner from a section of path we rarely traveled.

I parked the car in a lonely recycling center parking lot, just a few feet from the path and Ally and I walked down the hill. A man and a white Great Pyrenees were walking the opposite direction. The man was of average height, lean and prematurely gray. At a glance, I estimated him in his early 50s. Even though he was directly in our path, I couldn't have missed his seeing him. He wore a peachy-pink Breast Cancer 3K t-shirt over fashionably loose blue jeans.

We exchanged pleasantries, and commented on one another's dogs.

"You walk the bike path often?"

"Yes," I said.

"But not this section," he said. It was not a question, but a statement.

He was right, I told him. We typically walked a couple miles west, closer to our home.

He wished me a good night and we parted ways.

Ally and I proceeded on an unhurried walk, crossing a bridge, meandering into the forest and fighting off mosquitos. I watched her mine for rocks in the rushing stream. About an hour later, we returned to our starting point.

A sports car of some kind was parked next to my seen-better-days, badly-in-need-of-a-car-wash Saturn sedan. Not just a sports car, I could see now. A Jaguar. Our two vehicles were the only ones in the lot.

The door opened and an older man in a peachy-pink T-shirt stepped out. He perched on a boulder in front of his car and smiled at me as I approached.

"I wondered," he said, "if I could introduce myself to you."

Close up, I could see that he was an attractive man. Dimples, blue eyes, a quick smile and ... he was blushing.

"Chris Webb," he said, and shook my hand.

I gave him my first name, hesitated and then added my last.

How long, I wondered, had he been sitting there, waiting for me. And where was the dog? Had he walked her home, then driven back in the car?

I asked none of these things. But I stood a good six feet away from him, my big, black but completely fatigued and now useless protector between us.

"I wondered if I could take you to lunch or out for a drink sometime," he said.

I didn't want to hurt his feelings. In fact, I wanted to say 'yes' simply to reward him for his chutzpah. But the Jag, the dimples, the well-maintained body and blue eyes didn't touch me. Even the blush wasn't enough to tip me over into genuine interest. It wouldn't have mattered if this particular man had been in his early 30s, 40s, 50s or 60s, driving a jaguar or a dump truck. I simply wasn't interested in him.

"Well ... I ..."

"Here," he said, and pressed a business card into my hand. "I'll leave it up to you. You call me if you'd like to, and I'd be happy to take you."

"I'm very direct. But I'm not a stalker."

Immediately, I wondered: Could he be a stalker? Certainly, he'd sat in his car long enough to jot down my license plate number, even peer into the windows and see ... what? A copy of recorded books "Freakanomics," an Evercare brochure on the floor, an empty Nutrigrain wrapper in the console, my son's plastic green Martian figurine grinning at the car ceiling with its sightless plastic eyes? Nothing, really, that revealed anything about me.

I thanked him, told him I was flattered and that I admired his directness. He drove out of the parking lot, leaving me with a friendly smile and wave.

When I told two co-workers this story today, each had completely opposite reactions.

"My creep meter would have been burning red," said JoAnn, an almost 50 blonde Texan who had seen more than her share of male n'er-do-wells.

"I think it's awesome!" said my boss, Vickie, a down-to-earth, extroverted, also-near-50 brunette who had graduated from a homeless-by-choice 20-something into the top exec at our company. "A guy with a Jaguar waiting for you? How wonderful!"

JoAnn may be right. But if I believed her, the encounter left me feeling very nearly violated. Instead, I concur with Vickie. I had been paid a compliment by a nice, impressive gentleman.

Nevertheless, there are miles of bike path to explore. Most of them far from the Wal-Mart. Who knows? Maybe there's another of these guys - someone who piques my interest, touches my heart or does something so simple as make me laugh; really, that's all it takes for me - just around the next bend in life's unpredictable path.

Tonight, I chatted with a newly divorced single friend. She felt wonderful about her decision and, based on what she'd told me about the relationship, it was the only logical choice available to her. She'd been married and divorced three times she said, and was not prepared to do it again. "I'm done," she said, "done with marriage. Done with men."

She and her husband had been separated for many months, so, she said, the adjustment would be small.

"You get used to being lonely," she said, her expression implying this was a fact I - so long a single woman - already knew and would not argue.

I didn't say anything to her, but I disagree. You get used to being alone. You never get used to being lonely.

Alone is a condition. And often a desirable one. People with families, hectic jobs and frantic schedules long for alone time. It is a time for reflection and relaxation. Being alone often elicits a sense of freedom, the satisfaction of efficiency.

Lonely is an emotion. An ache that manifests itself as a pain inside your chest. You might become familiar with this feeling. But you do not get used to it. Lonely finds you in a crowd.

I am used to being alone. Self sufficient, independent, proud, so entrenched in my aloneness I'm not sure how successful I could be at opening my life to another.

Loneliness, however, demands that I try.