Deconstruction

Beltane                                                                            New (Emergence) Moon

Deconstructing a life. The circus tent metaphor with its stakes, ropes and main canvas 1000P1030696describes 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 1000P1030719be 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,1000P1030725 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)