In my ongoing quest to spend a month happily living solo, I decided to spring for some fresh, fanciful fare.

I've just finished reading French Women Don't Get Fat. It seems the French drink a lot of champagne and that, somehow, ingesting quality ingredients keeps their women from over eating.

I scored beautiful local goat cheese at the Hastings Farmers Market and picked up a lovely pink Brut for under $40.

I don't usually drink alcohol while I'm alone, but I'm in survival mode and the kids don't get back until after Labor Day.

Popping the cork and pouring the Brut into a pink marabou martini glass, purchased at the TJ Maxx bargain rack, life seems sort of okay for the moment.

This was not a reward for spending a month in isolation. I don't need a reward, because I know that a workshop or trip to the Omega Institute is coming up.

However, I'm convinced that every night I spend alone is going to help me be a stronger person.

Admittedly, as I'm having these thoughts, there is a strong craving for a Valium or something else that will make me feel numb.

I used to feel desperate if I didn't have a man in my life. I still feel desperate, but when I compare the relative peace of my little blue house in Hastings to my married life in the mansion, with my over-the-top, angry ex-spouse, I'm satisfied with my decision.

But when I think of the things I gave up to be a hermit, I want to cry. Family and friends from the last 20 years are gathering on Fire Island this month to swim, laugh, and sail together.

Flirting with single guys, and sometimes even the husbands of my friends, chatting with the hunky lifeguards, and making the rounds to Saltaire, Fair Harbor, and Kismet were all part of my married life.

Feeling popular, rich, and loved seemed ingredients for a perfect life. But they're not.

Since the divorce (two and a half years ago) and in the last year, I have discovered something quite wonderful. It is that each and everything that we do is important. So, consequently, I am no longer in a rush. Seems I spent 12 years rushing, rushing, rushing to please, to prepare, to arrive on time, to make sure "they" were on time, to get things done. And it nearly killed me.

Today, I take pleasure in the smallest of things. I simply look at the job at hand and begin. I cut linings for my friend's drawers today. I did not over think it. I did not look at all the drawers and think, "Oh, my God, there are so many of them."

She gave me the assignment, and I poured myself into it. I sat in the sun at my "work" station, which was a bench on her deck. I sat on a cooler with wheels, and I had a razor blade and a block of wood, an ink pen and a tape measure to complete my work.

I sat and drank a Smirnoff lemonade thing and began the task at hand. I did not care if there were rolls and rolls of this shelf liner that needed to be measured and cut and that the dimensions had to be 19 ¼ for some and 8 ¾ for others. I spread the material and measured and marked and cut using a quarter round to hold down the liner. I ran my blade as close to the quarter round as I could, paying attention to the fact that I wanted the edges to be smooth and not ragged.

I accomplished my task.

When the kids spill Pepsi or milk. When my dog gets sick and throws upon my floor or when the kitchen pipe under the sink leaks and I have to stop my current task or effort to relax and must stoop, bend, twist, unscrew, wipe, I do it willingly and almost happily.

I am a grateful Samurai, today. A soldier with Krud Kutter and Lysol as my weapons.

There is this hot little Italian named Bertazzoni. She is my friend's new best friend. Cooking. It's a great way to begin a relationship. It's a great way to help heal old wounds.

She cooks. Regularly. And now that her new hot little Italian has arrived, airfreight from the Old Country, she promises mouth watering delicacies that will, as she says, change me forever.

It has lots of knobs. She's still reading the manual, but she doesn't want to rush it. She tells me that she wants to understand exactly what happens and why it happens and how it happens. She can do this with her Bertazzoni.

It's a $12,000 gas stove. But to call it a "stove" is to demean this invaluable 48-inch stainless steel warm, ready to perform piece of artistry. She had a brother in the gas industry so she got the stove for half price, plus shipping and handling from the "Old Country."

I came to her home today to see it.

It moved me. Six burners, and each different dependent on the goal of the chef. One for bringing water to boil almost instantaneously. One for a slow, steady heat that will gradually take your entrée up to the perfect temperature and consistency. One that provides a way to almost double boil.

There is no husband like a Bertozzoni. No man will ever understand our need for the perfect temperature, for the perfect weight and height and stiff endurance in the good times and the bad. No, no man can compete.

Cook.

I am a woman in a very small kitchen with an ancient electric stove that offers little solace for me, but I manage to create my famous enchiladas and lasagna and even the crust less cinnamon and powdered sugar dusted French toast.

I don't have a Bertozzoni. I have a crappy $200 Kenmore, but it will do.

Springtime in Middle Tennessee is beautiful. The house I live in had flowers planted already, but for two springs they haven't bloomed. My landlady tells me that they are Irises. But, as I said, they haven't bloomed, so how would I know?

Irises come in many colors. The prettiest I think is the periwinkle blue (don't you just love that word — periwinkle — I love saying it). But for two springs, I've seen no blooms.

That changed this morning, a morning of my third spring. I'd seen it coming because I watched some green leaves sprout, thicken, and become stalks. Every morning, the stalks grew a little taller, and eventually I began to see the tips begin to swell. There was something good coming. I could see it, and I could feel it. 

Your recovery from a divorce is much like my Irises. The roots are still there, and the plant is living, drinking and growing, but simply not producing a flower. It may take a year, two years even longer, but as long as you're still there, standing and living, you're okay. 

What you will discover along the way is that you eventually will not feel quite so forlorn. You will notice that you are smiling a bit more, and that what used to bring you joy seems to be gradually easing itself back into your heart.  

A beautiful sky painted in dozens of colors that nearly moves you to tears. A sudden breeze that waves branches of trees and makes your hair blow around your face like an actress in a movie. A butterfly. Four-week-old kittens. Your favorite song suddenly playing on the radio and so you turn it up and sing along and feel alive and free and, dare I say it, happy. 

Keep the ring! Wear it, don't wear it. But for God's sake, keep the ring! Sell it, have it made into a necklace.

Was your ring important to you? What does a wedding ring mean? You belong to someone? Wait, that would make it more like a dog collar and a rabies license wouldn't it? If lost, please return to Mr. so-and-so at such-and-such address.

Okay, now I may just puke. Did I say keep the ring?

But, you can throw away reminders, photos, papers. I tossed and burned those, too. It made me feel good. It was like shaking off the last really awful memories of a very painful and disappointing marriage. I was glad I did that. 

Of course, what about the photos with your ex and your children? What's that old saying, oh yeah, "that's like throwing out the baby with the bathwater." Yeah, I held on to those photos. It used to hurt to look at them. It doesn't anymore.

When you can look at the photos or the items that came into your life while you were married without feeling pain or sorrow or regret, you are healed.

I don't seem to care about anything related to that part of my life anymore. I am moving forward and onward and upward. I am no longer "anyone's" possession. 

Nobody owns me. I am my own person. I am free.

And, my fellow FWW visitors and bloggers .... me likey, me likey a whole lot! 

No one to judge me. No one to bitch because there isn't any tea made. No one to expect, demand, blame, cage.

I am a furniture mover. My mother was a furniture mover, too. Every three months or so, I rearrange the furniture in my living room, my bedrooms, my kids' bedrooms. I don't know why I do it — I like change, I guess. And not just a change in where a piece of furniture sits but also a change in perspective.

But my mother lived what you would call the typical lifestyle of a fifties mom — had a career as a pharmacist in the Army, met and married my dad, received an honorable discharge, and began having babies.

She never worked again. I have worked my entire life.

So, though she did enter the military at 19 and she did become a pharmacist (which is considered a respectable career even today), she stopped her progression to marry and have children — to be a housewife.

Secretly, though, maybe she, too, craved change. Maybe that is why she moved the furniture around in her own house — to make it seem to appear that she was changing something.

In my world, I focus daily to change something or someone — to help, to assist, to further along something, anything. I want to move things around in my life and forward. I want change, and I like it daily.

When I do something different, try a new move, I am introducing myself to a change, I am moving outside of my comfort zone.

Sometimes we stay married simply because the idea of such a drastic change is more than we want to think about much less deal with. We stay in a marriage that is not fulfilling our spirit and our desire to progress, to move forward. We don't take the steps to change it. We're comfortable, maybe. We're certainly familiar. Known vs. the unknown.

But what are we waiting for? Why do we think it will change, he will change, if we wait just one more day?

In this very sensitive-to-spaying-and-neutering world and in view of all the unwanted dogs and cats in the world, I must beg your forgiveness - I let my cat get pregnant. She wasn't supposed to be in heat, but I shouldn't have let her out. But I did and she is.

But, oh, the sweetness of it all. It is an indulgence that I have let myself experience. In my life of so many losses, I have allowed my cat to grow new lives inside her belly. I have allowed myself to put my hands on her stomach and feel the growing life inside and then as the weeks passed to feel those lives move and kick. One, two, three ... I think I count four.

I have allowed myself to leave work early a few days ago because I sensed that her time was near, and was glad to know I was right as I lifted the tiny lives from my bed (yes, my bed) and the floor and moved them to the box I had carefully prepared for this event. And I gave in to the luxury of the celebration of life and called my best friend to say, "they're here -- they've been born."

And I was delighted when she, too, left her job and rushed to see the new lives that had come to live on Kenneth Avenue with my children and a dog named Brittney, a now mother cat and some sea monkeys.

I sterilized the knife and cut their cords and their birth sacks and helped mama cat adjust as this was a new world for her too, and I smiled as her instincts took over and she cleaned and nursed and settled into her new role as a mother.

They sleep by my bed in their box with a heating pad underneath to keep them extra warm, and I hear the mother gently coo and encourage her new babies to eat and cuddle and finally sleep. I hear her purr. I hear the tiniest of mews coming from the so-very-small mouths of the six new lives that have come into our world.

My brother thinks I'm too lenient with my children. I love him, but he and his wife never had kids. They've been married 28 years. Each has had the same job for nearly 20 years. They live in a home where you can see where the vacuum cleaner made its last stroke.

This is not the real world.

I live in a world filled with a dining table that serves as a place to put everything — bills, toys, drawings, reading glasses, books, clothes. My floor by the front door has a litter of shoes on both sides: tennis shoes, a pair of high heels, sandals, and flip-flops in sizes 7, 8, and 9.

My wooden floors are scuffed.

There is always some sort of sheet covering two of the three cushions of the only new purchase I have made since moving here after Hurricane Katrina — my lovely, comfy couch. The sheet protects my sofa from my dog Brittney's claws and hair and doggy smell, or so I think.

(Oh, and as a matter of reference, the dog came with her name — I rescued her from an abusive 26-year-old male neighbor — and that was the name she'd had for a year and a half.)

We run out of milk. There is often no bread, and we've actually had Edy's Rich & Creamy mint chocolate chip ice cream for dinner. Yep. That's the truth.

And when my son got in trouble for threatening to hurt another boy that he's been in and out of fights with since the beginning of school and got two days of suspension, I punished him with five licks, (not in anger), and no supper.

I felt bad for him because I know that the boy in question is a pain in the ass and has been for my son all year. But, my 11-year-old son has to learn to live within the confines of society, and there is a zero tolerance in schools for hitting or threatening to hit.

Ironically, about 48 hours after the "you look tired" comment, I received another completely contradictory compliment.

The other afternoon, I was visiting my friendly neighborhood housewares store — buying water filters and inquiring about boxes, as the time to start packing is now. Okay, so it's actually next week — or the week after... whatever.

So I am standing there chatting up the owner when these two women burst onto the scene. They are talking so fast that in my ridiculously fatigued state I can't even register what they are going on about. After a few moments, I catch on — they're sisters and lifelong residents of the neighborhood, who also happen to be a bit klutzy, and have to replace things often. Today's trip to the store marks another day when one of them had knocked something over.

They immediately approach the counter where Bob (the owner) and I are standing. They acknowledge my presence, and I theirs. One of the sisters stops rattling on long enough to turn and speak to me.

"You are absolutely gorgeous." Turns to her sister. "Isn't she gorgeous?" The sister agrees. What I really was: embarrassed. Why? Who knows? Other than the fact that I don't like people making a big fuss over me, there was no reason for me to be embarrassed.

I thanked them profusely for their compliment, made a joke about needing to leave my apartment more often, paid for my water filters and went along my merry way, with more spring in my step than when I arrived.

But there have to be some guidelines in this whole divorce thing when children are involved. Here are my personal rules for sharing my kids with my ex.

Guideline One: I do not answer the phone if the caller ID says it's Stinky.

I allow both of my children to call their father whenever they want. And he is allowed to call them as well. But they have to answer the phone when he calls.

Guideline Two: I refuse to listen to the sound of Stinky's voice.

My son likes to talk to Stinky hands free, and that means he likes to put Stinky on speakerphone. That's a problem for me. Joseph says it makes it like his dad is right there beside him. Admittedly, it's not like I can argue with that. But I insist if he is going to talk to his father in this way, that he do so in his room with the door closed.

Guideline Three: I don't suggest the kids call Stinky, and do not make them talk to Stinky unless they want to.

My daughter talks to her father much less and tells me that she doesn't really want to call him. She doesn't usually call him at all. However, when he calls, he asks my son to put her on the phone. If Caty wants to talk to her father, she does. However, if she doesn't want to talk to him, that is her choice as well.

Guideline Four: No voice messaging at home.

Not hearing Stinky's voice is definitely my preference, but when I had voice mail on our home phone, that gave him the opportunity to put his voice in a place that I might actually inadvertently wind up hearing it. That had to stop. I minimized my home phone service to the very basic service without voice mail. And I got myself a cell phone, finally.