This just in: I love Terry, the early-thirty-something-year-old white lady with a New York accent and wild dark curls who owns this retreat. She picked me up from the Denver airport and we chatted the whole way here. She runs this Colorado retreat during the summer, and the rest of the year she’s an elementary school art teacher, which is fabulously weird. She’s engaged to a dude back in New York, and she laughed me off when I told her long distance was a death sentence. We’re gonna be friends.

I follow her through the grass to a registration table set up in front of the cabin she parked us next to. The little square house is built up on six-foot risers with a set of steps leading to a front door.

Terry settles herself in the registration table chair and offers me a friendly smile. “Jamie, I really love your hair.”

I snort and ruffle my permed, grown-out, neon orange frizz ball. “Wow, unpopular opinion, thanks, Terr! The fam hates it.”

My roots are dark brown now and the orange starts around my ears. It’s a look. It clashes with the red overalls I’m wearing today. I love a good color clash.

Terry laughs. “I’m sure they don’t hate it.”

They do.

I take stock of the area as Terry organizes some papers. The registration cabin is at the edge of a valley surrounded by towering trees. Across the way, the land swells upward into a hill, and atop that hill snakes a line of small, boxy cabins.

Alas, my new home.

“You have your cell?” Terry asks. She pulls out a lockbox and yanks a key necklace over her head while I fish my phone from my pocket. I offer it to her as she unlocks the box.

Terry dubiously eyes my old-fashioned, non-smart, baby blue slide-up phone with an iPodesque click wheel like it’s a stick of dynamite.

I raise my eyebrows. “What?”

“What is that?”

“It’s my phone.”

Her warm demeanor dims. “We have a strict no-phone policy here, James. Is this really your phone?”

“Terry, go ahead and make a call. It’s my phone.”

She plucks it from my palm and screws around, sliding the buttons open and closed. Her face contorts. “What is this, like the Chocolate?”

I clap my hands. “Good eye! I like to stay behind on the latest tech.”

“Okay…” She drops my phone into the lockbox and replaces the lid before handing me a clipboard with a pen dangling from a balled metal string. “Sign up for five activities and one group chat. During your open time, you’re free to wander, hike, stargaze, visit the cafeteria, journal, come talk to me, whatever soothes your mind. Down by the cafeteria there are six different trails, all with different mantras and philosophical ideas to ponder during your hikes.”

I bob my head in approval. “Do you have a favorite?”