Yesterday I took a much needed nap and dreamed that I was back with my first husband. This has been a reoccurring dream where I am always trying to get back to the one I really love-but I can’t seem to make it happen. This time it was my first love, Jack Wells, that I was trying to get back to. Later I realized that I will be going back to northern Minnesota almost 32 years to the date that I left. I married Wayne on May 28th of 1977. It was a strange, dark time for me. I graduated from college one week before the wedding. I had worked my way through college by pushing drinks in a bar in Bemidji. Those four years are a fog for me filled with depression, and the dim scenes of the early seventies. All I wanted was to get away from that place. I think I would have married Saddam Hussein just to get out.
This does not make me proud. Wayne was a good guy, but we never quite met in the sweet middle. Always at odds. He was an engineer-I wasn’t sure who I wanted to be. Three children later we split up and I found Milt. These past 20 years have been all sweet middle. Now, we are about to embark on a new adventure-and heading back full circle for me . . . going home.
It is so odd. Whenever I tell people that I have quit my job and we are going to live on a piece of land in the northern woods, they always ask if I am retiring. My mind blanks out at the question. I think of the word “retire” and imagine a person backing away from life. I think of this as going forward into life. I’m 55 years old and returning to a place I hated and married to get away from. Now it calls me like a song-wind, water, earth, rain, sun. (I think I’ll skip the snow and the freezing cold.) We are one week from leaving. We have done a stunning amount of work to get ready for this, and I am so ready.
Today I walked around the house looking at what remains of my material goods. It is pretty thin. I got a couple of empty boxes and asked myself, “What do I really want to keep?” Even the things I chose to keep all seemed to relate to where we are going; a thin tin cutout of turtles, a painting of a bear laying on his back eating berries (Milt bought me this in Alaska), a beautiful basket we bought in Mexico, a clam shell filled with small white pebble from Pebble Beach, CA (we made love on that beach beneath a blazing sun). Ah, the sweet middle. Beneath my Swedish gas heater is a wooden box filled with the stones I have gathered during our travels while we produced Oyate Ta Olowan for public radio. I will leave those stones there. I washed them all this winter because the dust had gathered and I wanted them to look as if they were still where I first found them; the Colorado River, Alaska, Lake Superior, Bra D’Or in Nova
Scotia . . .
I guess this big change has me feeling a bit sentimental. So much has gone away. Maybe tomorrow I will post a piece of the novel I mentioned in my last post-about the woman who deconstructs her life. I love that story but it (like so many) remains unfinished. One of my goals is to get back to storytelling.
Maybe I needed to go home first.
Happy Mother’s Day.
Jamie