Summer                                                            Most Heat Moon

Woollies at Wilde Roast in St. Anthony. Jon, Scott, Warren, Frank and Stefan. Ode circled us in cars he was test driving, but never touched down. Tom was in Chattanooga, Bill and Charlie H. in Wisconsin, Paul in Maine, Jimmy in South Dakota.

Major topics: Sold sign on the next to last Wolfe household. Congrats, Warren and Sheryl. Frank’s right leg pain is gone. Scott is working like a beaver to finish a roommate apartment for his stepson Alex and his significant other. Yin’s having some difficulty letting go of material, mostly clothing, accumulated over the years. Stefan’s winding away from the workaday world, yet experiencing, in his words, uncontrollable anxiety about days looming ahead in which he might not be productive.

We focused for a while, in response to Stefan’s transition, on the question of how to deal with a need to be productive. My contention is that you need to do things which feed your soul, which express who you are. My writing is one example. Fly fishing could be another. Doing favors for folks another. Working with computers for the electronically challenged could be another.

Stefan raised my statement, made awhile back, that I wanted to do only the work only I can do. I stand by it. Over the next 20 or so years, perhaps my entire lifetime from this point forward, my focus will be on those kind of things. Helping raise our grandchildren, tending our garden, writing my books. Working politically on those things that I care about deeply.

Afterward Jon and I wandered over a rusted iron bridge to an island in the middle of the Mississippi. We looked at the water streaming over the receding St. Anthony Falls. Having him at this Woolly meeting brought together the attractive forces that have kept me here in Minnesota this long and that now pull me on to Colorado. A sadness, a certain kind of sadness, came over me.  I’m glad that I have such good friends that I will miss them as family; but, I’m sad to leave them.

There was, too, a muted joy in joining this man, now in his mid-life, and his family. Muted, I say, only because I reflected on it at this particular moment, just after leaving my friends for the evening. And those number of evenings are diminishing.