Eleanor's birthday launched the holiday season in earnest. Caroline couldn't help but feel carried on a wave of momentum as her world began settling in around her. The festive blur of Christmas marked but not defined by omnipresent twinkling lights, celebration, family, and good spirit. Her good feeling started as a small, perpetual smile, and grew into an overwhelming feeling of contentment as the month passed. Good spirit wasn't always what strangers might conjure up as a first impression of Caroline, but it was certainly in her, and something that this new season of her life evoked more and more often. Her world now felt less like a shaken snow globe - more like the calm and peaceful village scene at the center of it.
As they always do, the pages quickly fell from the calendar. And as they did, Caroline realized that their passing didn't provoke an anxiety of the rushing year, or a sense that time was slipping through her fingers.
Flora grew taller and chattier every day, more defined as Flora every day, but it wasn't with sadness that she watched her childhood pass. It was instead with anticipation of who she was becoming, the ways she enriched the entire family as she grew as an ever more vibrant thread in their tapestry. She began to understand and enjoy Eleanor's influence on Flora and see it take shape as they spent more and more time together. Eleanor stepped more and more confidently into the role of Flora's mother, less often glancing at Caroline for approval when Flora's behavior or words demanded a course correction.
Family and friends came and went through parties and dinners and festive excursions, but the parting and the understanding of the brevity of the encounter, the suspicion that perhaps once or twice a year might always define these exchanges didn't sadden her. Rather she began to regard each of the times as the gift they were - for the joy they brought her at the moment and without the expectation that it must be repeated simply for the sake of it. These friends and distant family members who dropped in and out at the time of year she most longed for connection were simply happiness in and of themselves.
More than once during December Caroline looked around her glowing dining room and realized that her life had expanded beyond what her small table could accommodate. A setting for five would no longer do, even most weeknights. Even without the Halifax crew a simple dinner might include any number of smiling additions. Greg and Jenny staying when they dropped Flora off, Alan and Celia popping in and Eleanor and Lily setting extra plates because Lawrence happened to be by as well. Friday nights with Jane and Zoe, and on occasion Meg and Jill. When Gillian and Robbie did join, the volume eventually became a gentle, warm roar, and if Raff and Ellie were there with Calamity the house practically shook.
William had returned from Tel Aviv and from Oxford a man. No two ways about it - soft features hardened and carriage completely certain. He moved in the world still with quiet and grace, but now with that air of certitude that had been absent before. Caroline marked the change in him most of all.
Less than Flora's growth spurts, watching her boys become men left her feeling her years. It was quite one thing to experience leaps and bounds in her tiny girl's cognition and experience of the world, to grow with her as she saw things in new ways and for the first time still on a daily basis. But to watch the story of life begin to etch on the faces of her young men and become indelible was another matter entirely. To understand that she had traveled with these two their entire journey, now residing with them in adulthood and seeing them always as her boys – but now also as peers in the vast stretch of life that marked maturity, forced a perspective she couldn't deny.
Alan and Celia made her frown and smile just as often now, as their own years began to show in a slowing, though not a dimming. Caroline looked back at their recent start, and also forward to what their love promised each other in the time that remained.
In doing so she felt beyond lucky to have found Eleanor so soon. Lucky that their story had decades of chapters to be written, lucky that it would not be her epilogue to find joy and companionship, but rather become a part of the fullness of her entire story. Lucky that John would not be the defining relationship in her life, but more a false start to be understood and eventually considered with a rueful smile. Lucky that Kate had been there when she had needed her the most. Saved from perhaps dwelling endlessly in the disaster of her first marriage and transformed into a woman who was more than ready to make a fairy tale ending of her third.
As the New Year approached all of these pieces of her life began to coalesce, she felt a setting in place. But alongside it she felt that perhaps a change was necessary. Her entire world had expanded and it was time to consider growing with it, to consider being the person who had the capacity to not only understand this much joy, but to be someone who was responsible for multiplying it and living without fear in that happiness. She was not the Caroline Elliott of only a few years past. And an endless string of surnames wasn't what she wanted defining her relationship to the people who most influenced her life as those names piled up.
The close of the holidays and the turn of the calendar was always intended to bring change and renewal. Caroline considered that given the solid structure of her life, the presence of more than a dozen new and old family members, it might finally feel safe to explore a home that better reflected this new structure. A home that embraced the changes in her and in her world that were good. Changes that made her feel safe, rather than anxious. Changes that made her curious, not tentative. Changes that made her more fully open to love, rather than guarding against potential hurt.
With her feet feeling so firmly planted on the ground, she decided it might to be fun to simply explore her world, and new ways of living in it. As the final page of the calendar fell, and she opened her eyes to the grey dawn of another brand new January, Caroline rolled over to face Eleanor and declared it an excellent day to begin looking for a home to share.
"Oh my god. Caroline." Eleanor leaned her head back and closed her eyes in ecstasy and was silent for a moment. "When was the last time you had full-fat yogurt? I know we're meant to rush this morning and get on to house hunting, but I've got to savor this."
"I don't think I know, off the top of my head. But if the look on your face is any indication of what I've been missing, it's been far too long." Caroline snickered at Eleanor, across the kitchen counter.
"It's not just all the flavor, it's everything. The texture. The richness. The density. Oh my god." Eleanor took another spoonful and pulled it slowly upside down through her lips. "Amazing." She shook her head. "I've been completely wasting my mornings for years. And for what?"
"Hmmm. Let me see if I can recall this phrasing exactly. I think I can, because you've asked me to do this on several occasions." Caroline cast her eyes to the ceiling. She set her face to look as much as Eleanor's as she could muster and lowered her voice in a fairly close imitation - "'It's your job to keep me on the straight and narrow, Caroline.'"
"When did you start listening to me?"
"I always listen to you. I just don't always agree. And look - if you want to have regular yogurt once in a while, for god's sake woman, do it." Caroline put her hands on her hips and shook her head.
"You'll still love me if I lose my girlish figure?" Eleanor's tone was mocking, but her expression belied a vulnerability in the question as she recycled the now empty container. She hadn't quite licked it clean.
Caroline stopped short of tossing off a rote and affirming answer. "Are you happy with who you are? I mean, are you happy with yourself as you are now, and back when we started dating, as well?"
Eleanor paused from wiping down Flora's booster chair, its owner long gone to the adjacent living room to forge new horizons for Thomas and friends with an ever expanding track. It had begun to cover most of the living room floor, which was now difficult to navigate.
She didn't look at Caroline, but stood straight and placed the back of her hand on her hip. Her brow wrinkled.
"Yes." She resumed the wipe down, but her attention was on Caroline. "I am."
"Then I couldn't care less about your figure, unless you care about it. Unless it's something that makes you happy, some part of you that's inextricable. Because I think that I love you most when you're happy with yourself, no matter what else is going on." Caroline hoped that she'd answered the question in a way that would mean something.
Eleanor nodded at her on her way to the kitchen sink to rinse out the dishcloth. She wrung it thoroughly and draped it over the faucet, pausing to look out the window at the morning sun rising to the left, beams of light falling over the winter-bare vines covering the bricks of the garden wall.
She leaned her hip on the counter as she turned back around, eyes consuming Caroline. "I want you to remind me of something else, on occasion."
"And that is?"
"The fact that right next to my two perfect daughters, you are the woman I love more than anyone else on this planet." With this, Eleanor stepped forward and backed Caroline up to the counter, kissing her as though the very last bit of oxygen in the room could be found only in Caroline's lungs.
Caroline smiled against her and couldn't think about stopping them, at least for the moment. She moved her hands to Eleanor's hips and pulled them firmly into her own.
Eleanor snuck her hands under Caroline's shirt and cardigan, palms at her waist, wrapping them around her and running her thumbs over her stomach, still kissing her as though they were headed straight to the bedroom – or to the floor.
Lily breezed in, hand up at the side of her face shielding her eyes, headed directly for the fridge. "Okay seriously, you guys. Please." She opened the fridge door and stuck her head in. "I'm all for gay marriage, but you don't have to throw it in my face."
Caroline covered her mouth with the back of her hand as she turned away from Eleanor and her teenage daughter, smiling at the mockingly homophobic joke, but still beginning to blush from her roots.
Eleanor cleared her throat, tossed her hair back, and smoothed her shirt. "I'm sure you're scarred for life."
Lily rolled her eyes as she grabbed the string cheese and apple she'd been seeking, closed the door and leaned against it. "No. I was scarred for life when I caught you two arguing over who got the corner of the couch because it was more comfortable if you feel asleep watching reruns of Dr. Who. If that's what it means to be fifty on a Friday night, kill me now."
Eleanor stared and Caroline began to shake with laughter as Lily waved and headed straight back upstairs, quickly glancing over and smiling at Flora.
Hand on her stomach, Caroline caught her breath as she stood next to Eleanor. "Oh but she's just you all over, isn't she?"
"I have no idea what you mean." Eleanor turned again to Caroline, fire back in her eyes and recovering quickly from any embarrassment. Once she got going it was hard to stall Eleanor's engine. "And I was in the middle of something."
Caroline smiled as Eleanor advanced. "What do you want to do more – me, or houses?"
"Why is that a zero sum equation?"
"Because I still haven't mastered those theoretical physics of time travel."
Eleanor's face fell and she pouted, still moving Caroline slowly backward with her body and her eyes. "It's been five days, Caroline. Five." She held up her hand, fingers spread wide, in illustration.
"I'm glad you're keeping count." Caroline laughed. "I think we have the house all to ourselves on Tuesday. Not that you seem to have hang-ups about that." Now Caroline placed a finger on Eleanor's sternum and reversed their course through the kitchen.
"If you make me wait for you until Tuesday, we're going to have real problems."
Caroline's eyes widened. "Meaning?"
"Lily introduced me to Aretha Franklin. And I'd like to quote her as saying, with an appropriate pronoun swap, 'If you want a do-right all day woman, you gotta be a do right all night – woman." Eleanor made a menacing face and tilted her head to the side, chin out and all business.
"Mmmmmmm. I see." Caroline nodded. "All night then. I'll hold you to that." She smiled and stepped around Eleanor. "We've an appointment to see a house in half an hour. I'll get Flora if you'll finish the breakfast dishes."
Eleanor turned to watch Caroline walk away. "You think you're quite clever, don't you?"
"Yep."
"I think you're going to be quite sorry, Caroline Dawson. And soon."
"I hope that's not just an idle threat." Her voice tapered off as she turned into the living room to collect Flora.
Eleanor turned to the kitchen sink to finish the dishes, and called out over her shoulder. "I don't make idle threats."