Friends said I shouldn't have married him. He's an alcoholic, they said. There's no happy ending there. He'll never be able to give you anything. You're too smart to tie yourself to someone like that for the rest of your life. Your life will never be the same, they said.

Thing is, since I met J my life HASN'T been the same, but not in the way everyone thought. I bought a house (me--in MY name only--not my husband's) and in that house every morning I wake up next to him and we go to sleep curled around one another with our dog at the foot of the bed snoring like a bear. And when the diabetes is kicking my ass or that change-of-life thing has turned me into a pale, worn, and weary woman for a day or two, J brings me ice water and orders in Chinese and lets me read snippets of whatever book I'm devouring (right now it's Julie & Julia) out loud to him. He doesn't even glance at the laundry piling up or the coffee stains on the cabinets and he'll even feed my dog and let him in and out even though I got that dog against J's wishes and he made it clear he wasn't going to have anything to do with dog care. He will take my truck to put gas in it, check the oil, wash the windows, and bring me back a cherry slushie from Dairy Queen.

No doubt my friends' meant well and were only trying to save me from a life of bail bondsmen and sleepless nights. And it's true that J has a special affinity for cheap tequila. And I admit that he is an alcoholic, but not the stereotypical fiend portrayed on Lifetime television who beats his wife and bullies his kids and fights with the neighbors. He holds his job and hands over most of his money and doesn't stop off at the bar after work. Usually after he's had a few shots at home he goes to sleep on the couch in front of the TV and I putter around the house or go shopping or throw a ball around for my dog in the backyard. It doesn't bother me at all because I spent the first 42 years of my life alone, man-wise, except for one long-term boyfriend and one short-term boyfriend who fathered my son. After T was born, I just didn't want to bring any men into our lives to mess with him. Or me. So I was celibate for 17 years until I met J. We were just friends for months, and then we were lovers.

One summer on my birthday he came over to spend the night to celebrate with me and he just never went home. We hadn't discussed living together or even what sort of relationship we had, but my son went to Navy boot camp a few days after my birthday and I was so upset and lost without him that J wouldn't leave me in my apartment alone. He'd been living with his elderly mother and stepfather, as the stepfather had developed a hideous case of Alzheimer's wherein Mom needed to be protected by his daily violent outbursts.

We never really even discussed marriage. One afternoon we had another couple over for barbecue and R and I had decided to plan a big barbecue and were deciding on a date. I said to her, "May 10th. That's perfect. Not too hot yet. Just before Mother's Day. Hey, that'd be a great day for a backyard wedding too!" J looked up from his place on the couch where he'd been discussing something terribly boring like tile setting with his friend T, but apparently had still one ear turned to the female conversation, and said, "Okay. Why not? Let's do it." So we did.

I will never regret it, because even with his drinking and the accompanying depression, I am so well loved I can't imagine any other man treating me the way this one does. When we're out together, there's no doubt we're a couple. We never fight, though we've had the occasional round of connubial disagreement, like the dog thing. I had always said that once I got my own house and escaped apartment living, I'd get a dog first thing. J said no dogs; the poops, the vet bills, the barking, and now that there's no kid in the house, why tie ourselves up with a dog? But one day I woke up, got dressed, and said, "I'm going to the animal shelter. You can come with me and have some input or you can stay home and just deal with what I bring back." He put his jeans on faster than I could find the keys to the truck because he heard the determination in my voice and he knew that he'd better ride along and make sure I didn't bring back an enourmous animal or a little squeaky one. (I chose one kind of in the middle, a 65 pound Lab-Husky-Shepherd mix named Justice with gold eyes who knows how to win hearts and find his collection of red rubber balls in the backyard lickedysplit if someone happens outside.) Now he plays tug of war with the pooch and is the first one to offer to take us out to the river so he can run his four legs off and he lets the dog in and out when doodie calls. And when we watched something on TV about a vaccination for dogs that helps with venomous snake bite, he was the first one to say, "You need to take him in for that."

Ours isn't a perfect marriage. But you know that scene in As Good As It Gets when Jack Nicholson says, "You make me want to be a better man?" Well, that's me on the flip side. I have mellowed so much being with this man that my mother said, some years ago when J and I had first met, "What happened to you? You're a different person. What happened to the girl who used to bite the heads off snakes and took no prisoners?" Well, I think part of it was just the natural aging process wherein I hit middle-age and fighting the world just got tiring, and part of it was that being in love and being loved mellowed me out. And a bit of it, too, was that my son was grown and gone and I wasn't slogging through societal rules against single moms and bastard children.

We stay in a lot, because we like to be alone together, but sometimes we meet a friend for karaoke or we go out to the river for a swim or we pack up and head for Beaver Creek to sleep under the stars. Sometimes we both wake up in the middle of the night at the same time and we make love and go back to sleep without saying a word and I love him even more in the morning.

Marriage is an ongoing process and for many people it's like going down the Yellow Brick Road barefoot and being trampled by the Horse Of Many Colors when you finally get there, not a wizard one in sight. No answers. No rescue. But being alone, I think especially for women, is harder work. So it's true what my friends said: My life will never be the same. Thank God.

There's this new group of people they call "foodies" and I think I'm one of the gang. We collect food magazines and cookbooks. We have obscure food items in our cupboards. We wander the aisles of the supermarket like we're in a candy store. We watch the Food Network. Rachel Ray and Ina Garten and Bobby Flay are our poster chefs. We go to kitchen boutiques and finger all the gidgets and gadgets. We have our favorite chef knives that no one but us better lay a hand on. We have Morton's iodized salt and kosher salt and sea salt and gray salt. We wish there were cheese shops on every corner instead of Dairy Queens. We buy professional cookware until there's room for not one more pot on the rack. I wish I could say we all had professional cooktops, but, alas, my neighborhood isn't equipped with gas lines so I have a brand new glass-top stove and convection oven with an overhead microwave that my husband just bought for me. I am in love. (With my range AND my husband. I enjoy turning them both on--though maybe not at the same time.)

Today I'm making a big meal because it's our Friday, even though it's Tuesday. Usually we dine late, eat slowly, and then cuddle up in our bed and watch Law and Order or CSI or whatever we can find that we can both agree on. But the food we never disagree on. Usually it's great, sometimes it's good, occasionally it's so-so, but rarely is it not edible (though sometimes no matter how carefully you've followed a recipe, it just doesn't look like the picture, though it might taste just like the page it's printed on.)

Tonight I'm preparing Parmesan breaded chicken strips with peach mustard chutney and lemon almond string beans. I took the menu off the show How To Boil Water with Tyler Florence. It seemed simple but something other than the usual, which is what I'm always going for. I grew up in a house where the food was good, but it was pretty much the same five dishes: fried chicken, pot roast, pork chops, meatloaf, and spaghetti. There were occasional variations, of course, like baked lemon chicken or an occasional steak off the grill, hot dogs or hamburgers on a busy weeknight, and our sides were usually potatoes (baked, fried, boiled, or mashed), canned corn or green beans or spinach. And usually a salad to start the whole shebang off.

Some time after I first met my husband, he stayed over for the weekend but I had to work. (I work out of my home.) So he decided he'd cook dinner for me while I was in my office tapping away at my keyboard. I heard the cupboard doors open and close as he went looking for supplies. Then all of the sudden he's standing beside me with a perplexed look on his face, saying, "You don't have any canned foods." Which wasn't entirely true. I had tomato sauces and tuna and beans. But since leaving home I'd discovered fresh vegetables were indescribably better than anything canned (though some frozen vegetables are quite good) and I found that preparing fresh wasn't much more time consuming than opening a can and pouring them in a pot. My poor future husband stood there empty handed and obviously disconcerted by my lack of S & W or Green Giant products. I said to him, "No, I don't have canned vegetables, but I'll go get you some if you like." And just last week he was rummaging around in the cupboard for sardines and he came to me with a can of peas in his hand and said, "What's this doing in there?" Because he's gotten so used to fresh now that he can hardly bear anything canned. (I'd bought the peas for a salad recipe I'd torn out of Eating Well Magazine.)

About a year ago I was doing my weekly shopping and an older woman in the line behind me was staring into my cart and then she said, "Wow. You've got some great food in there." I told her that I loved cooking, that it was something of a hobby and she said my family was really lucky to have a cook in the house. But her comment got my attention. I started glancing into people's carts whenever I was at the market and for the most part I discovered that there was no food in their food. No romaine lettuce or bags of lemons. No fresh garlic or yellow and red onions. No wedges of Paremsan or cod fillets or short ribs. I saw a lot of frozen pizza (and I mean a lot--we all ought to buy stock in companies that make frozen pizza), frozen lasagna, TV dinners (which I wouldn't even serve to my dog), way too many green boxes full of low-carb-low-fat-low-sugar-high-sodium food, if you can call it that, Campbell's tomato soup, instant oatmeal, boil-in-a-bag rice, etc., etc., etc. And though I know we all have jobs and we're busy with things like football practice and gymnastic classes and dance lessons, it was disparaging to find that so many people were more familiar with their microwaves than their spice racks.

A friend of mine doesn't cook at all. One year, on her daughter's 16th birthday, she got stuck in Prescott with a broken down car and she called me begging that I go over and help her daughter, Nicole, start her own birthday dinner. When I got there, the lasagna (homemade, at least) was on the top shelf, the oven was set at 225 degrees, the oven door was wide open and on it was the garlic bread wrapped in foil. I said, "Nicole, what exactly are you trying to do here?" She said, "I'm cooking, I think." Because her mother hadn't taught her, because her mother used the microwave to "cook" or the telephone to order in, because her mother hadn't used the oven herself for months. This 16-year-old girl did not know even the very basics of cooking! Well, we had a good laugh over that one and when we later shared a house together I did much of the cooking and a bit of teaching so the poor girl wouldn't be tossed out in the world without knowing how the broiler worked.

There's this old advertising jingle that everyone in this country knows. "I'd like to teach the world to sing in perfect harmony. That's the real thing." Well, I'd like to teach the world to cook and to appreciate good, fresh food again. I'd like people to sit around the table and discuss the day and touch bases with each other. I'd like there to be enough food on every table to fill every belly. I'd like everyone to know how to turn on their own stoves and fill the house with the scents of Chicken With 40 Cloves of Garlic and scalloped potatoes and mushrooms sauteed in butter and shallots. They just don't need to know how to turn on my husband. That's my job.

The mermaids come out at midnight. Up they come from the bottom of the sea, green-blue bodies glittering under the quicksilver moon. They have only a moment to waltz on the sand before the starfish call them back. They bob on the surface of the water, watching the shore, yearning for what is beyond the mountainous dunes. A whale calls and the mermaids slowly descend to the depths where they glide through the swaying kelp and out to the coral beds beyond the breakers. They sing the tides in and out, their ocean clock, and sweep the sandy bottom with their tails. They are the keepers of secrets and dreams and all understanding.

Friday night my husband and I went to see David Cassidy out at Fort McDowell Casino. A friend of ours is in management there and gets us free tickets on occasion. So we thought, Why not? Gets us out of the house. Growing up, no one in my family was really into the Partridge Family. I was a Bobby Sherman and Mickey Dolenz fan. I kind of preferred the oddball types, goofy acting and silly looking. But, as I said, the tickets were free, the margaritas were only $4, and the night was cool enough that we wouldn't sweat and suffer in our plastic chairs.

David did a lot of his oldies from the TV show but he also sang some other tunes and actually rocked a few times. He talked a bit too much and there were a few equipment glitches that he was gracious about but really did interfere with the smoothness of the show and there was some grumbling from the crowd around us, but we enjoyed it all, even the grumbles. I think watching the crowd was almost as entertaining as what was happening on the stage.

There were the obligatory blondes with their rather large breasts standing up front trying to get his attention and blocking the view of the folks who'd gotten there early enough to get good seats. (More grumbling.) And I admired David for his choice of a young brunette woman (early 20s) whom he called out of the crowd and sang to while she hung around his neck and appeared to be having an out of body experience. She was a bit chubby and rather plain and wasn't wearing a top that showed off most of what her mama gave her. But he offered her this wonderful experience, an extraordinary gift that she will most likely never stop talking about until her last breath. Because girls like her aren't the ones pulled out of crowds and made to feel beautiful and worthy and special.

Growing up, my sister was the pretty one, the gregarious one, the one who could sit in the living room with my parents' adult friends and converse like she belonged there instead of in the backyard with the rest of the kids tumbling around on the lawn. She had an incredible fall of sleek, long dark brown hair and even longer shapely legs and felt at home in a crowd of adults. They would say of her, "She's so pretty!" And then I would get, "And she's our little Honor Roll girl." Two years older than me, I admired my sister's ease and poise and kept hoping that I would one day catch up with her, that my awkward stage would magically dissolve and that someday someone would say I was pretty too.

When I got to high school, only a year behind her as she'd been held back in first grade due to a long bout of illness, no one knew I was her sister. There were just no similarities save for our last name. She wore mini skirts and knee-high boots and she'd perfected the use of eyeliner and mascara and could make boys go silent in the halls and cars stop to let her cross and doors swing wide to let her in. I wore baggy jeans and boy tee-shirts and hiking boots. My curly red hair did nothing but curl and tangle and scream Ronald McDonald.

One day the family was going to my younger brother's football game and she herded me into our bathroom and said, "I'm not going out in public with you anymore unless you put makeup on." She wasn't being cruel, really, though it might sound that way. I think she sometimes felt guilty about the attention she got from the world and having to always pull me out in front to get my share, because she was always doing that, though I struggled to stay in the shadows. So she taught me, at age 16, to carefully line my eyes and thicken my lashes and shine my lips from the wands and rabbits in her velvet cosmetic bag of tricks. Then she took a blow dryer to my hair and switched my tee-shirt out for a sleeveless cotton top with the first two buttons undone. I didn't look like me. I didn't feel like me. But I liked the transformation and I've never looked back, building a collection of my own potions of beauty, though I've also never reached the pinnacle of beauty my sister attained.

So when David overlooked the bombshells with their blonde locks and their blinding cleavages, their sequins and stilletto heels, and chose the chubby plain girl, I became a true fan where I hadn't been one before.

During the concert, when David sang I Think I Love You, and my husband sang along with him with his forehead against mine, I felt comfortable in my plastic chair. In fact, I felt beautiful.

I moved to Arizona in February, 1995, sight unseen. I'm a Northern California native so as I passed through Los Angeles and made my way into the Southwest, I stared out the window of my overpacked car and wondered if I'd made the right decision. The desert spread out like a dusty moonscape and the huge cacti at the side of the road amazed me. I remember my first summer when the thermometer hit 121 degrees and my father called and asked, "You ready to come home, Sis?"

I grew up with the cool Pacific no more than minutes from my doorstep. When I was a kid, if I'd left my jeans crumpled on the floor when I went to bed at night, they were damp in the morning and my mother would spread them over the radiator vent to dry them out a bit. We thought anything over 70 degrees was hot summer weather and we'd get out the Slip and Slide and our water pistols and run around the neighborhood in our swimming suits. Now 70 degrees chills my bones so that when I go home to visit, my mother always puts extra blankets on the sofa bed and makes me the homecoming present of a pair of new fuzzy slippers so my feet stay toasty. Even in June.

A lot of people don't like the desert. They say it's dry, colorless, hot, and dusty. They complain that there's no water, no rain, no green. I would have agreed with them some years ago, but now I would have to argue with them. No where else have I ever seen sunsets of gold and passionate pink with swipes of deep orange and arcs of purple. The same for sunrises which hang on the horizon in swathes of petal pink and brilliant gold and make me late for work while I dawdle on the back porch with my morning coffee. At night, after the sunset, the sky turns blue-black against the mountains and the stars congregate in a twinkling dance like a billion ballerinas dusted in silver.

Sure, you have to be half Gila Monster to survive the heat, but it's amazing how quickly we adapt when we have to. I learned to keep my hair short, to buy cotton tops and shortie shorts, and I own a dozen or so pairs of sandals and flip-flops of every color and style because I don't really wear much else except for the occasional pair of tennis shoes when out camping. I love to wear makeup but it has a tendency to slide off your face by mid June so I've gone to face powder and lip pencils and matte eye shadow because they don't melt. I get up early to go shopping, water the yard after dark, and pretty much stay in the house if I'm not up north camping.

My husband and I have found some beautiful camping spots. Our favorite oasis is Seven Springs, but unfortunately it burned this summer and will take several generations to heal. We used to wade in the creek and catch crawdads to boil as an appetizer before dinner. Once we found a turtle about the size of a dinner plate and we carried it further downstream where it would less likely be discovered by other people and taken out of its natural habitat to reside in a boring aquarium in someone's back room. Now we've discovered Beaver Creek, a little place with only a dozen camping spaces but a gorgeous swimming hole bordered by red rock cliffs and surrounded by oak trees and an occasional pine. This may be a desert, but there's water-water everywhere.

There may be no ocean beach here, and it may only cool down five to ten degrees at night, and there's a heck of a utility bill to pay for about four months of the year when the air conditioner runs constantly, but I can't imagine living anywhere else now.

My father has since passed so there are no more calls asking if I'm ready to come "home", but I think that in the last few years before his death he'd already figured it out...the desert is my home now.