Fall                                                                   Harvest Moon

The internet is forever.  At least for now.  I learn this every so often and right now I’m learning it again in regard to a post of mine from two years ago that has become my most commented upon.  It talks of a difficult time in my life, when my then wife, Judy, and I bought a farm near Nevis, Minnesota, a back to the land moment.

Johnny and Judy, could be a mack the knife sort of tune, left me standing by myself one weekend in September of 1974, standing alone on 80 acres of scrubby land with a house and some outbuildings.  They took off for the Caribbean to spend the winter working boats sailing those waters.  Judy and I were married.

I took a quit claim deed to the farm signed by Judy and an uncontested divorce to the Hubbard County courthouse and legally resolved that episode of my life.  Legal action, of course, is not emotional nor does it shed history, rather it records emotional and historic changes.

As I say in that short piece, written after a day of using the chainsaw on our land here in Andover, I don’t blame Judy.  I don’t.  Three years after this time I acknowledged my alcoholism and started on the long road to recovery.  My behavior toward her in the months and years preceding 1974 would have made me want to run away to the Caribbean.  A bad time in my life that reached its nadir right about then.

Our life, our whole life, remains within us and within the memories of others.  It is not something we can set aside, push out of the way, deny.  We can, with time, place events in our life in context, in the trajectory of a whole life, yet they remain what they were.

I am no longer that young man, just as Judy is no longer that young woman.  We have both aged, gone different ways and had our own futures.  Those were exciting, revolutionary times and much of the revolution happened at the personal level.  Judy, Johnny and I played a part in that change, a small part, yet large in that moment of our lives.