Luxury Sweet

Happy Valentine's! We celebrated ours two weekends ago, with a night at a downtown hotel. We let the kids swim in the pool and gave them a bath in the jacuzzi before dropping them home to spend the night with a friend, who also gave us the keys to her snazzy convertible. If you don't have a friend like that, may I suggest, unreservedly, that you find one, and never let her go.

It was our first overnight without kids since our trip to Ireland two years ago. It was fun to pretend we were of the jet-set, and not, as George Jones and Tammy Wynette sang, the old Chevro-let set.

This time last year, we were getting our old house ready to sell. One of the many "someday" projects at that address was the master bedroom. It was enormous, with a balcony, a fireplace and a ton of potential, but we never even got around to painting it. Like so much of that space, it felt incomplete, like a sentence that trails off. It was a room without conviction.

Last month, we finally finished moving in, only eight months after changing our address. Everything we hadn't unpacked or found a place for had gravitated to our bedroom as we organized and decorated the rest of the house. It was clutter's last stand.

I evicted what was unloved and unneeded, and put the finishing decorative touches on the room.

"For the first time," I told Patrick, "I have a bedroom I love better than a nice hotel room." He thought it was funny, but I was serious. For the first time in our life together, we have a bedroom that is a real retreat.

A jacuzzi is swell, of course, as is room service. And after zooming around Sunday morning in our borrowed coach, our five-year-old minivan never felt (and smelled) more like a pumpkin.

But coming home to this?



Makes me feel like I get to keep both glass slippers.