I met him on Match.com three days before an enormous SUV ran me down in a marked crosswalk.

“Bella, I love the paintings, which I presume you did. I enjoyed how you wrote your profile. Curious, would you have rather left your Border Collie and put down your husband? I called mine my BM (Big Meltdown). And I have seen a lot of stars since. Are you a star? -Don.”

I laughed and read his blog, www.driveabout.me, documenting a road trip and search for love. In 2019 he dumped most of his stuff, jumped in his car, and adventured throughout the country for months. At 63 years of age, he wanted “more, after recovering from multiple health issues, a staggering partnership implosion and a divorce from a woman he had been with for 37 years.”

I had sufficiently recovered from my own meltdown. After implementing a software system across five states and four time zones, I collapsed, wholistically exhausted. In 2006 I dumped my career of twenty-seven years and moved to Moscow, Idaho with a man I loved deeply and couldn’t imagine living without. We remodeled a house, hiked in the wilderness, and made new friends. Joining the Arts Commission, I dabbled in painting. When my mother became ill in early 2007, I traveled cross country to see her through illness and death in the fall. I then did the same for my father who died in the spring of 2008.

After my father’s death, my husband morphed from loving to frigid, leaving me feeling as desirable as a toothache. I went to the Humane Society looking for a Labrador Retriever to love and came home with a border collie named Cash who told me with his eyes we were meant for each other. Cash and I ran year-round on Moscow Mountain among wildlife he liked to herd, including moose, bear, and porcupine.

Owing to my Southern Pentecostal conditioning that blames women for most human shortcoming, I blamed myself for my husband’s lack of affection. To win him back, I joined him in Emergency Medical Training, followed him in and out of a nursing program. I pushed him into marriage and individual therapy, taught power yoga at the University of Idaho, and worked out at a 24-hour gym. Meanwhile, I chastised myself for playing solitaire for hours each day, which, according to a Vietnam Vet, was a symptom of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder.

Gleaning advice from self-help books, I took up meditation, manifesting, fearless thinking, and kicked the mind-numbing solitaire habit. I recorded six Joys most days: “Milky Way over Palouse wheat fields; seeing two bear cubs in a tree while running on Moscow Mountain; waking after restful sleep.

I euthanized an aged and ill Cash and left my husband six months before connecting with Don on Match.com on the 18th of January 2020.

I confessed to feeling timid.

“Bella, jumping out of perfectly good airplanes, sailing the high seas, teaching yoga; not activities I would associate with a timid person. Obviously, there is a story yet to be told. I can wait.” He confessed to being dumped by a woman for not being bold and assertive enough.

“Maybe I don’t understand the definition of timid and bold. -Don.”

On the morning of January 21, 2020, I awoke rested and joyful, having completed neurotherapy for insomnia and lingering grief the day before. After meditation, I sketched Washington’s Goat Rocks Wilderness in soft pencil. At the end of the day managing a Habitat for Humanity thrift store, I left my apartment for a walk.

Walking laps around downtown Moscow, I mused over Don being the match who shares my love of nature and people, who feels passionate about life and me in it, who never grows tired of kissing me or holding my hand.

An hour and a half into my walk, I stepped from Main Street into a marked crosswalk on A Street. I never saw the SUV or its driver that a grainy security video shows too sharply cutting a left turn, hitting me from behind and dragging me over twenty feet.

I remember being slammed, propelled upward, crashing onto the hood, pain terrorizing my upper left back. Begging, STOP, PLEASE STOP!

Face down on pavement, liquid filled my nose and throat. I feared leaking brain fluid rendering me mindless or dead. I can’t die now. My creativity just started. I’ve never been truly intimate with a man. I was 60 years old.

I messaged Don two weeks later. “I broke my left scapula, a type of fracture representing less than 1% of bones broken, cut a gash above my left eye requiring 17 stitches, suffered a concussion, and broke a perfectly long nail. Heavy sigh.” I excluded being readmitted to the Emergency Room after friends and a doctor grew concerned with my “bizarre” behavior.

“Bella, Oh no, that’s terrible. I hope you do make a full recovery. How long to grow the fingernail? Don’t hold it against me but I have owned three Suburbans in the past.” He confessed to embarrassing anecdotes: never winning in eight years of swimming competition, earning no more than four bucks as a “professional” writer, recently sucking at designing a database for Wall Street trades.”

I laughed and confessed my idiocy in flogging the dead horse of a marriage for a decade.

During long phone calls, I sketched and doodled, which quieted the buzz in my left ear, and focused my damaged brain. I evaluated him against a spreadsheet recommended by my therapist: What You Want in A Relationship, What You Don’t Want, What You Will Compromise On. “Get into values, finances, your sexual wants, politics, anything that is important to you.”

Brilliant intellect, huge sense of humor, compassionate, and kind, loves to make love to me at any age, made the Want column. Addict of any kind made my Don’t Want column with a “HELL NO!” in Willing to Compromise. “Non-Republican” failed to make the Want column only because someone still voting Republican after Trump would have failed most of the other requirements.

In nightly phone conversations, I judged Don a match and longed for him with the intensity of a teenager hooked on romance novels and pining for first-time sex.

Ten days after my accident, he drove to see me from Whitefish, Montana where he planned to explore Glacier National Park and continue his search for a life partner. We met at a coffee shop with mismatched furniture and paintings by local artists. Arm in a sling, a stitched gash above my blackened left eye, I was easy to spot.

He came for an overnight visit before Valentine’s Day. We necked while watching television from my sleeper couch late into the night before I retired to my bedroom—alone. In the wee hours of the morning, I heard him at my door— “Bella, can I sleep with you?”

The extent of my injuries began to reveal themselves: shattered left shoulder blade, aggravated hernia, broken teeth, a root canal unseated, torn right rotator cuff and hip labrum, my voice weakened and wobbly. And then there was my traumatized brain. A Home Healthcare nurse tested me with problems including subtracting two numbers from one hundred and drawing a clock with a particular time on it. I failed. Turning the TV on for the first time, I felt as though someone was poking needles into my eyes. In a department store to buy a large shirt to wear over my sling, I froze, crying “I’m not okay. I’m not okay. I’m not okay.” Even drawing or painting became too stimulating, triggering hyper vigilance and sleeplessness.

During Don’s third visit in late March, my medical providers began canceling appointments due to COVID-19 restrictions. My brain froze, blazed into a brawl of anxieties, then settled briefly into a blissful state of impulsive thinking.

Don moved me to Whitefish on April Fool’s Day. We made love, hungry and exploring, once in a van in Glacier National Park. We fought to understand each other from opposite backgrounds; he is the youngest of three boys raised by a chemical engineer and school administrator. Privileged in ways that allowed for indoor swimming, skiing, college out of state. A middle child, I was raised by a rural postman who transitioned from loving and engaged to belligerent and nasty after one too many beers and a mother who served homemade cookies and milk most school days. Growing up in a 900-square-foot house with 4 other people, I attended technical colleges until an employer paid for a bachelor’s degree in English and Computer Science.

We both graduated early from high school with advanced math skills and started college young. Exactly one month after my eighteenth birthday, I married a boy addicted to drugs in an Assembly of God church, where the preacher advised me to “obey your husband and never deny him sex.”

Don’s childhood diet consisted of TV dinners and chewable vitamins. I cooked for him dishes with whole food, including key lime pie with limes bought from Walmart. Following instructions in a recipe calmed the hyper-vigilance that made me as jumpy as an up-close observer to a bomb diffusion. Ever so slowly I began painting mini watercolor landscapes, each one taking weeks to complete due to painting’s taxing effect on my brain.

While driving me to medical appointments, Don held my hand across the car console. My greatest fear going into hernia surgery was him humoring me into popping stitches. When mysterious jaundice and a false positive COVID test landed me into a COVID ward, he wrote me a poem:

I lay my hand on your pillow but don’t touch your head.

I roll to your side but don’t touch your body.

I miss you.

My brain-healing slowly progressed as I lie in his arms sharing funny or painful stories and hiking pandemic-shuttered Glacier National Park. It regressed with four surgeries, divorce mediation, reading, painting or anything positively or negatively stimulating.

In October, we moved to Sisters, Oregon. We hiked at rocky outcroppings, where we photographed sunrises and sunsets over the Southern Cascade mountains. I walked to a rented art studio but rarely created, panicking when crossing streets. Working with my fifth physical therapist, I worked up to handstands with a foot touching the wall, ignoring pain in the non-broken shoulder, which I later learned was torn. Working with a cognitive therapist I learned that my brain struggled with competing stimuli. A year later I learned I had damaged white matter in my left frontal lobe, which involves making connections.

After my divorce finalized on December 3rd, 2020, Don and I married in near-freezing weather in a park by a socially distancing officiant found online. Two friends brought champagne, snacks, and a camera to document the event. The entire process brought me joy.

On August 4th of 2021, my grandson’s other grandmother called as I was entering a chiropractor’s office for trauma therapy. Chadwick, my only child, was in a house fire in Portland. “It’s bad. He’s in a coma.”

I clung to Don’s hand as he drove us through towns and hillsides burned away in Oregon’s apocalyptic year of 2020 to a hospital whose name I forget. Chadwick’s friends and exes waited outside Intensive Care. We women who loved him talked to him as he took his last breath.

Beyond the trauma and grief, I focus on my many Joys: decaf Americanos, morning meditation, moose, and bear in my woodsy yard; a deeply intimate post-traumatic love beyond any I could have imagined.