Mid-Winter Deep Freeze

I note today that the weather here today is almost the same as PEI-but without the constant brutal winds and sea-effect snow. Have been a bit under the weather and perhaps settling after a bit of a virus, but it is almost gone now. Jason made chicken and dumplings for the camp after his grandmothers recipe. It was quite good. Almost like mom's but he uses no vegetables.

An email came from Joey today. He likes his social sciences classes as I did as a young lad. He said he is free Saturday and may come up with his girl and her son, with her parents permission. So be it.

Mary and I talked a while this evening. We have this decision date of February. If I am not back by then we are to "break up". I barely feel I have had enough time to decide if the kids are OK yet. Maybe I didn't mention that I got a call from a headhunter that wanted me in Iraq NOW. They had already started my paperwork for a 14 month deployment. After talking to Mary and my son (who both broke down), I declined the "opportunity".

Miss Mary but I am not leaving here yet. If it takes more time so be it. I am afraid that she could be the right one, but the kids have to come first at this time. I actually think Mary doesn't believe that I am coming home. The entire concept of "home" has become so vague to me at this point its non-resolvable.

I have sacrificed for a sweet embrace for many years only to lose the very foundations of my own being. It will not happen again. You see, its choice between home, and "home home". An elusive definition.

No mail from anyone else in Canada-that one I think now after a last nasty attempt at extortion has given up-my ultimate sentence for not rolling over this time is eternal silence. A German tradition-to be "shunned", or as in the Becker/Konig familiy "to be disowned".

It is railroad ties. That means that one Becker Uncle didn't pay the other Uncles about 10 bucks for railroad ties on the prairie 40 years ago. The debtor Uncle was dis-owned and died alone in a trailer somewhere near Grover, Colorado. Dead of being "shunned". Shel always predicted that fate for me. She has worked hard to accomplish that. Oddly enough I am still on vacation, wondering what it would be like to live life guiltless, admitting no wrong at any time. It might be paradise-until the balloon bursts.

Warm Rain to Cool Blast

The cliche that time rushes past seems apt today. I was thinking of nearly flying along the highway in my corvette between Grover, Colorado and Carpenter, Wyoming. It was the fastest I had driven a four wheeled vehicle then. We hit about 135 MPH. My then young brother-in-law was with me. The low prairie hills seeming to rush up and into a clear sky, the other side uncertain. Up and down. The Vette's fiberglass body seeming to float as the sixth gear could pull no more speed with that gear ratio and horsepower. What a rush.

Now I prepare to leave my island home for an undetermined time-perhaps for always. That seems unlikely but I can't see over the hill as the wind rushes past beyond the now security of my little harbourside apartment. There is a woman here who loves me deeply. There is another lost to the world beyond my reach who I love eternally but in vain.

Shel has said she is coming to get her remaining things soon. I have given my notice to my patient landlord that I must head South with the flocks now ahead of me to see my teenage children and sister. Leaving the women behind, my new social group-as flawed as it is, as well as the ocean vista, is painful. I feel I could relapse anytime and await the winter blow and snow piles-The driving maritime ice storms and warm hearts.

But all illusions end this way. Passage into and out of this torrent of time is but for the memories taken as are the breaths of fading lilac-scented breezes and the hint of deep true long lasting joy and suffering. Life is about loss and how it is dealt with in the turmoil that is a human soul. Grounded in my loves and stories of past glory-that fleets and ebbs with my harbour tides.

But what an honest and beautiful effort that has been made. In no way do I regret my awfully early retirement and mission to the island. Now after all it is home. I dance with my Mary each weekend. She makes island fishcakes as lovingly as my mother baked bread or taught me to love what is real and natural. Somewhere along this road of years I became a romantic dreamer. Lost in that which is the finest to hold and the most painful to lose. But what a driven glory.

I know now the deep sadness and rural hardships that shape the lives of those who feel imprisoned in this paradise. In the telling of life journey to my friends here I see the blankness of longing-the unknowing as if the words and images of my life are so strange that they are sometimes unsure and afraid. I have learned the dialect. I have learned the food and the joy of an ocean harvest and the bounty of of a place that is an Eden. So my wife was right to fall so far and deeply in passionate embrace to this place in the sea.

In my own heart the wanderlust of a thousand journeys takes root again. The long path back to reality and another country to the rush and crowds that toil for that which I have lost or simply left behind as worthless trappings of a vacant life.

So times sweeps on with me as the unsettled passenger. As across the prairie grasses in that angry red chariot of my overfunded impious youth. Look forward and not to the rear says the driver. She has no need for the luscious safety of the past. Its soft security darkened as the red-mud surf of my beach at Green's Shore is during the unrelenting harsh January blow across the ice filled bay.

No time to waste now. Only to collect the fragments that remain of here and her, and her. I only hope at full throttle someone hasn't just pulled out ahead of me over the next rise. I won't be able to stop.