Dear Folks, Well, it’s the time when the garden wells up in a flood of vegetables.  The overabundance is worse this year than usual.  What with the horse manure Sylvia put on the garden over the winter and the reliable rains this summer, we are up to our necks in veggies and flowers.  We haul in daily baskets — zucchini, broccoli, beans, lettuce, corn, tomatoes.  Anna takes perverse pleasure in counting the daily cucumber pick — forty today, she announces when I come home.  The house is bedecked with bouquets of dahlias, larkspur, asters, zinnias, cosmos, lavatera, geraniums, petunias, calendula.

The pumpkin vines have broken out of their assigned space and are climbing over carrots, up cornstalks, through fences,and over lawns.  Pole beans have reached the tops of their 8-foot tepees, climbed back down again, and are spreading over the landscape, getting into fistfights with squash vines.  I spend every Saturday pickling and freezing.  Yesterday we had our first Cornathon.  That’s a session where we’re so busy freezing corn that we don’t stop for a meal — we just fill up with corn.  (Not a bad meal!)

We are a great vegetable-eating family.  Anna and Sylvia keep finding new recipes that use beans.  Dave swears he is actually not sick of zucchini.  I eat two big salads a day.  Heather is a cucumber fan and can easily dispatch a whole ear of corn by herself.  But we are barely making a dent in the harvest.

To make matters critical, our two men have departed for Florida.  Don’s father died this week, and Dave drove down with Don for the funeral.  Don’s father left his mother when Don was little, and they’ve had little to do with each other, but deaths in the family are always a trauma, no matter what one’s relationship with the deceased — maybe the trauma is even worse when the relationship has not been good.  Deaths are also an opportunity for a family to come together and heal — we’re sending psychic vibes down Florida way hoping that will happen.

So Don and Dave are gone, and Sylvia and Heather may join them next week.  Their absence puts a great cramp not only in the vegetable eating (and picking, if Syvia goes) but in the new painting business.  Furthermore, Anna is expecting to be summoned any minute to help out with the birth of her first grandchild, so she may be gone too.  And I leave at the end of the week for my annual trip to Hungary for the Balaton meeting.  So this normally well-populated farmhouse is going to be strangely quiet.  We are trying to work out schedules (around an unpredictable baby arrival!) so that at least one is person is here to take care of the animals.

But who’s going to eat all the vegetables?

I have been in steady “bulldozer mode,” scrabbling to get columns ahead and chapters finished and proposals written and everything organized before the Balaton meeting.  For some reason, probably dire necessity, the writing has been going well, for hours every day.  I feel consumed by it.  I can’t get myself to stop until I almost fall down from tiredness.

I am living in a world of my own, all in my head, a world of wilderness ecosystems (the book) and chemical sensitivity (the column) and agricultural sustainability (the proposal).  In case any of you have ever considered living with a writer, my strong advice is: DON’T.  Writers lead isolated, uncommunicative, wierd lives, in imaginary places.  They are not in the room with you, even when they’re right there.  I spent this week in Amboseli National Park worrying about the Masai and the elephants.  And along the Kissimmee River in Florida, working on the restoration of the Everglades.  And in Guanacaste Province, Costa Rica, helping Dan Janzen save the tropical dry forest.  (You will see all this in Show 8 of the television series next year.)

The good news is that the Wilderness Chapter is finished, which means 6 out of 12 chapters done!  Half way through!

The bad news is, given the TV broadcast schedule, I should be all the way through by now.

And I have to go on like this for another whole year.

When I realized about a month ago that all the above statements were true, and when the TV people said they were going to broadcast the show on the original schedule anyway, whether the book was ready or not, I thought it would be a brilliant move to quit.  The more I thought about that idea, the better I liked it.  So I quit (remembering, as I did so, the warning of a colleague who has done telecourses before, and who told me a year ago, “there will be a moment in the project when the print people walk out in disgust.”)

Quitting turned out not to be an easy thing to do.  After long discussions, many memos, quite a bit of upset on the part of several people, including me, I unquit.  I gritted my teeth and prepared for another 15 months of this life, me and my Macintosh and piles of books and data, all day, every day, for a book that will not be available until months after the big TV splash is over.  Oh me, I hate to think of it, even now that I’ve plunged back into it.  I have to hold tight to One Day At A Time thinking.

Out of the quitting/unquitting process some good things came, though.  I am now much better supported in doing the work, both financially and logistically.  At least for the next 15 months I won’t have to worry about paying the taxes on the farm.  I also had to focus hard on my own intellectual responsibility for the series and the book, and on what the Real Point, the Central Message needs to be.  I feel much more clear about what we are doing, and also more excited about it.  I feel more empowered in my role in the enterprise, and also more intimidated — what an undertaking!  Summarize the state of the world in 10 television shows and 12 chapters (and four syllables, in the case of the series title, which we’re currently groping for).  The more I read and write about the state of the world and see the footage the TV producers are bringing back, the more I see how complex, contradictory, disorderly, dynamic, frightening, exciting, changeable, and ungeneralizable things are out there!

To soothe myself through the coming year of writing, and in my new-found if temporary financial security, I took a big plunge last weekend and bought the one Big-Ticket Consumer Item I have been wanting for many months — a compact disk player!  Actually I ended up buying more than that; a nifty Sony miniaturized radio, double tape deck, and CD player, all of which, with speakers, fit on one bookshelf in my study.  I bought a CD of Kathleen Battle singing lieder to inaugurate it, and I have been bathing myself in wonderful music ever since.

I don’t write a lot in this newsletter about how important music is in my life — probably because I haven’t had much time for music these days.  There was a period in my foolish youth when I intended to be a concert pianist, and I still have a Steinway baby grand that is the joy of my life, though I’m always woefully out of practice.  Nowadays I use my piano almost entirely for venting emotions.  (When I’m playing hymns or Scott Joplin or Mozart, I’m fine, but when I’m playing Satie’s Gymnopedie I’m sad, and when I’m playing Beethoven’s Appassionata sonata, stand back, I’m wired!)

The music I most love is opera, which my housemates don’t exactly appreciate, but now I can play opera in my study to my heart’s content without bothering anyone (hence Kathleen Battle, my favorite soprano, as my first CD choice).  I’ve discovered I can tape off the radio, so last weekend I snagged a copy of a classic 1950s recording of Zinka Milanov, Jussi Bjoerling, and Boris Christoff in Aida.  Wow!

I was amazed, as I was perusing catalogs and cruising stores, at the zillions of choices one is offered to accommodate one’s slightest personal Listening Desire — big sets, small sets, for the car, for the house, for the beach, through earphones, with backpacks so you can go walking, playing records, tapes, radio, CDs, programmable for 5 hours without stopping.  You name it, they have 8 different models of it.  The technologies are wonderful — this little rainbow disk whirls around and somehow communicates with a tiny laser beam and out comes the soaring, transcendent voice of Kathleen Battle!  Incredible!  It seems that human beings can do just anything.

I was amazed, but sad, too, studying all the electronic options.  The world has paid so very much attention to meeting my Listening Needs, for which several hundred dollars can be extracted from me.  But I have other needs, more important ones, non-material ones, that the world doesn’t care about in the slightest.  In fact it’s probably because those needs aren’t met that I want to escape into music.  And think of the very basic unmet needs of the people who don’t have several hundred dollars to spend, even after a whole year of hard work.  Surely if the marvelous ingenuity of the Listening Needs industry were put to work on satisfying those needs, every person on earth could be properly fed and clothed and housed.  Human beings can do anything, I thought as I toured the glittering world of digitized, laserized sound.  But they have such distorted ideas about what to do!

Anyway, without the slightest guilt I am filling my study with great music and thanking the technical wizards who bring it to me.

This weekend Dennis and Suzanne were married down in Durham NH, where they now live.  I report this news for the historical record, since so many of you know them, though I guess I’d just as soon avoid the subject.  This newsletter is a communication to friends and a therapeutic way for me to work through my life, but there are limits to how much anybody, even me, wants to make everything public, especially when it involves the privacy of other people.  Well, I have broached the subject now, though, haven’t I?  Gulp.  Well.  Let’s see whether I can be honest here, about my side of the story anyway.

For those of you who are new to this newsletter and to my life, Dennis is the man I was married to, and professional partner with, for 21 years, and Suzanne is my best friend, who lived here at the farm for 7 years.  For all those years, even when it was clear what was happening to Dennis’s and my relationship, and to theirs, I loved them both, and I still do.  Suzanne is so like me that I think of her less as a friend than as a sister.  We can read each other through and through without saying a word.  And Dennis is in so many ways different from me that for years he was like a necessary other part of me, filling in my valleys, shoring up my weaknesses and drawing out my strengths.

I miss them more than I like to admit — and I am also glad they are out of my life.  Since they left last fall, we have had little communication, except for the continued professional contacts that Dennis and I will always have.  I think our lack of communication is not permanent, it’s a stage we’re going through as we build our new lives, as they work through their mourning for the farm and their feelings of guilt, and as I work through my anger and sadness and loneliness.  Separation is healthy for us now.  Growing and moving on is the work we have to do, the learning of lessons and the telling of truths.

I can’t say a thing about their process over the past nearly-year, except that they have apparently settled the question of their commitment to each other.  I’m honestly happy about that.  Sure, sad too, and jealous — the mixture of emotions I felt when I heard they were getting married was quite astounding to me, though the news was no surprise.  I can’t imagine what I’m jealous of, since I certainly don’t want to be married to Dennis any more, or to anyone.  I suppose it’s just a general jealousy that single people feel about couples, an envy of a reliable closeness and support and emotional sharing — which may not really exist for the couples we envy, but we fantasize it for them, and then feel jealous.

My marriage was such a good one for so many years that I can fantasize, or remember, the joys of Coupledom quite easily, and thereby get myself feeling all deprived about my current state.  But of course there were times when my marriage was hurtful and debilitating, and when I remember those times, I rejoice that I’m free and single.  It’s all true, the joys and the hurts.  All part of the whole picture of marriage.  Almost impossible for me to keep in my head in the proper balance.  It’s clearly not time for me to be married again.  I’m awestruck at Dennis’s and Suzanne’s willingness, or courage, or foolhardiness to enter those deep waters so quickly.

So on to the question you’ve all been wanting to ask these many months: is there a man in Dana’s life?

No, thank God.  How could I ever find time for a man?

Seriously folks, I have been sufficiently hurt, prickly, and insecure these past few years that no man could have come close to breaking through my Invisible Shield.  The few who tried got their ears pinned back.  I note to my surprise that the Shield is falling away now. My attitude about close encounters with half the human race has evolved from hostile to nearly neutral.

I hope and pray no man notices that for a long time.  The period of aloneness I have been going through is just what I need.  I have not lived without a Significant Man in my life since I was 13 years old, and therefore in many ways I have never grown up.  I never had to fix the plumbing or do the income taxes or stick up for myself or face an emotional crisis with just my own resources.  I’m getting intense pleasure (mixed with frustration at my clumsiness and inexperience) out of learning to do all those things.  I’m making wonderful discoveries about my own capability.  My pleasure is downright wicked when I learn to do something better than Dennis ever did it.

Of course I’m also discovering that no person is totally self-sufficient, and that’s a good thing too.  I’m learning to reach out to others when I need them, ask for help, admit all the things I can’t do (very hard for me).  I’m finding there is human support everywhere, in my farm-mates, in OA, in my professional colleagues, most particularly in my female friends, whom I never really quite got to know when there was a dominant male in my life.  I don’t need to depend on any one person, not a spouse, not myself, but I need to depend on many.  The Higher Power works in your life through other people, say the folks in OA.  I believe that now, and I am learning to trust in it.

So in fact this is a wonderful time for me, not always an easy time, but a growing time.  It’s not over yet.  It is not a time to spend even one minute looking for a potential Man in My Life.  That time may never come.  If it ever does, it will not be because I need a man in any way.  It will be only because I can love one and be loved by one and forge a partnership that can serve a higher purpose than just Coupledom.

I’ll let you know if it ever happens.

Don’t hold your breath.

Love, Dana