Beltane                                                                            New (Emergence) Moon

Deconstructing a life. The circus tent metaphor with its stakes, ropes and main canvas describes the physical and emotional act of moving well. But it doesn’t speak much to the time before moving. As I worked on the dog stalls, taking them apart screw by screw and with pry bar and small sledge when necessary, another metaphor came to me. Deconstruction.

To move permanently to a new place hundreds (or thousands) of miles from the old one requires several acts of deconstruction much like the dog stalls in our third garage bay. The obvious physical ones require utilities to be stopped, a home to be vacated and perhaps sold, a neighborhood left behind, friendships must be changed to accommodate a new situation, memories stored on city streets, in restaurants and parks must be given up or purposely recalled through writing or story or photograph.

What’s really going is that the life carefully built, or, perhaps not so carefully, now has to be dismantled, packed up and moved. At least all that is movable. To go back to the dog crates, the wood no longer has their shape. It has already lost the memory of what it once was. But I have photographs and Kate and I have many stories about the dogs who fed there and the young man who built them.

There will be no more Minnesota life when we finally follow the moving van west. Its pieces and parts will stacked up and stored. The integral experience of living in a place will have shifted locations, this time to Colorado.

This transition will be much more intentional than my flight from Indiana. That time Judy and I packed our stuff in a trailer, pulled away from Connersville and never looked back. That was annihilation rather than deconstruction.

Several years of analysis, a good marriage and a circle of excellent friends has convinced me that leave taking, deconstruction in this case, is important for all parties. We plan to do it as well as possible.

(man with tool)

Beltane                                                        Emergence Moon

Planning on an hour or so a day, maybe two some days. Today the garage. Clustering yet another batch of toxic chemicals for a run to the hazardous waste depot. Old motor oil, gasoline preservative, brake fluid, paint. I put in that pile the ambitious collection of items I got when I decided to tackle small engine repair.

In my usual avidity I dove into it, buying manuals, tools and imagining the things I could fix: snowblower, lawn tractor, weed whacker, chainsaw. Why? I can’t recall now, but, like the irrigation system I reasoned, it can’t be that hard. Oh. Yes. It could. Wrenches and screwdrivers danced out of my hands. Things weren’t where they were supposed to be, or at least where I figured they should be. Turning screws, cranking off recalcitrant nuts, slipping belts off and on and connecting metal latches all had unanticipated problems for me. I’m sure they were the kind of thing a kid learns with a father or brother who enjoys these things, but I skipped that part of my education.

Finally I admitted what could have been obvious to me in the beginning. This required more patience than I had and more skill than I was willing to learn. I felt a bit defeated, somewhat ashamed of myself as a man, not being able to get simple mechanical tasks done.

This sequence of imagining myself into some new skill began with lock smith ads in the Popular Mechanics and True magazines I read as a child. Boy, if I knew how to pick locks, make keys, install safes, I’d have a real, useful craft. Over time this theme of having a real, useful craft would, oddly, lead me to attend seminary and learn how to be a minister. Ministry was not, however, equivalent to being a locksmith. It was both more and less complicated, more and less useful.