Born to be a wolf.

Finding common ground.

After we had coffee she took me up stairs and showed me to an empty room. “This is your room, you can paint it however you like ok, its been bare for years so giving it some life again will be good.” I looked around the room and images and ideas started coming to mind. “I’m going to need paint, lots and lots of paint.” Gwen laughed. “Well you know that way to town; there is some work that needs to be done around here so I’ll see you when you get back.” She was laughing all the way outside, I made a mental note of how big the room was and roughly how much paint I would need. I get back into my car and go into town I head straight to the hardware and start picking out paints, I ended up with other 100l of paint and 50 different brushes. Then I went to look at lights, a lovely man helped me find the perfect lights, they were tiny and when turned on looked like tiny white stars so I ordered 300 of them. Then he told me that it was possible for them to be wired up to a small solar panel that I could put on the roof, when he showed it to me it could fit in the palm of my hand. “Sure that would be perfect.” I smiled at him, so I had 3 guys follow me out to Gwen’s to do the lights before I did any painting. I marked out where I wanted them all then they set out to put them all in. Gwen was happy about the solar panel and even said she was thinking about running the whole ranch that way so I had them put together a big package to cover everything on the ranch and even store power, enough to last 2 months because of storm session. So in one day I had already spent $75,000 and it was only lunch. I know Gwen had money from my dad but I had enough for 10 lifetimes, besides she hated it so I loved it even more. The installers took most of the afternoon to do everything that I didn’t actually get to paint before going to bed. In the morning I woke up early and decided to get a jump on the painting, I did 3 base coats then painted the back wall behind where I wanted my bed in a dark blue and the over 3 walls in a light green for a forest theme. At 7am Gwen came in and pulled out a brush, “Mind if I help?” she asked tying her hair back with a smile. “Can you paint?” I asked raising an eyebrow at her, she laughed whole heartedly. “35 years and counting now, did you really think your dad was the only talented one?” she smiled. “Well let’s see what you got, those 3 walls are all forest theme.” “And what’s that one?” she asked pointing at my wall. “A full moon over a mountain.” I said flatly, I didn’t know why I wanted to paint the place that had done this to me but I felt a pull to go back there. For 3 days we barely left the room or slept as we finished painting and every detail was perfect. Once it was all done I went into town and bought a black leather bed suite and it was absolutely gorgeous. Finally my room was done; as I stood back and had a good look I finally noticed how alike Gwen and I painted. Early Friday morning I went to the high school and enrolled myself, and then I went and got my supplies which were just an excuse to go to the city and do some shopping. Friday night Gwen and I stayed in a hotel together and it was an awesome night, one that I will carry forever I never remember her having such a great sense of humor and she was even a little bit of a dare-devil. We took our time returning to the ranch but as it came into view I realized just how much I had missed it. When we stopped out the front there was a padded A5 envelope resting against the door with Gwen’s name on it. I didn’t really pay attention to it as I start taking bags upstairs, its funny I wasn’t a big spender by any means yet since leaving the city I had spent over $200,000 in 1 week. But I needed everything, I needed a place that was mine and safe from the outside world.