April of 1982. I get a letter from Andy. Ah......Andy.

Remember way back a couple of weeks when I said my ex and I moved into this big gingerbread Victorian house, he in one bedroom, I in another, he dating one of my best friends, I dating the guy who lived in the back apartment? Andy lived in the back apartment.

Andy was a Vietnam veteran. A biker without a bike. A bartender. Tall, wiry, kinda funny lookin' in a handsome, sexy way, cool as all hell, utterly irresistable. At least, to me. After ten years of marriage to the perfect husband and father, I had the bad taste to fall for the bad boy. Not an uncommon story. It was because of Andy that I started smoking again. Oh - he didn't want me to, nothing like that. It was just, when you divorce the perfect husband and start dating biker bartenders, you start smoking again. Just goes with the territory.

Andy came to a Halloween party I threw - my first Samhain party, actually, giving it the Celtic pagan name. We danced to Janis Joplin. That was all she wrote. He used to creep up the stairs into my bedroom after work. One night, he wouldn't let me say anything at all. We made love, and he left. In January I went to England for a month, and he broke my heart with a waitress. A very nice waitress. I couldn't fault his taste.

Ah....Andy.

This letter comes a few years later. He's left the waitress, and moved to Minneapolis, where he is getting some help with post traumatic stress, and for some reason began writing to me. "It is nice not being my own worst enemy for a change," he writes.

Another postcard, this one sent to me in Seattle, forwarded on to Camano Island, finally catching me at Alhambra Place in Madison, which means it's 1980, and I'm on my way to graduate school in Pittsburgh when my ex gets back from Italy. This one is from Mary in Rio. A picture of "Sunset at Ipanema"with the Two Brothers mountains in the background. She is visiting her sister, who apparently is visiting Rio. They are laying around in the sun and going to Iguasu Falls. I am walking my daughter along the highway to the busstop for kindergarten. My ex-husband's car is in the garage. He decided at the last minute that he couldn't trust me with the keys. The apartment complex is on the beltline. Damn! Rio!

Postcard postmarked Chicago sometime during 1980, addressed to me in Madison. I am living in Madison for six weeks at my ex-husband's apartment with the kids, while he is off filming something for NOVA in Italy. The postcard is from Marion, my surrogate mother, and one of the women in the 6 women painting. I admired her more than almost anyone else I ever met. She ws a co-founder of the NOW chapter of Door County, and loved and supported us younger women in ways that only someone who was not our biological mother could have. I wish I knew if she was still alive. She would be in her late 80's, I believe. The postcard is an image by Max Ernst. Marion's husband was dead (I think), her adopted son was grown and gone, and she had moved back to Chicago to study art. In the card, she invites me for a visit, kids and all. I know I went sometime later - probably not this time, however. I hope she knows how much I loved her, even after losing touch. I only lost touch, because I didn't want to disappoint her with what I wasn't doing with my life.

Another day, another poem. I don't know who wrote this one. I suspected it may be Mary, but on reading it I realize that, much as I love her, this is way beyond her style. It's also way beyond mine. Is it a song? Did someone write this original poem on a piece of my notepaper and leave me with it? There is no name on it. It's dated 10.16.85.

A Fall

Jessie's laughin' at something falling
Firewood wall in the hallway smells of pine gum
Drops collect on a window to the firs
As if that natural lens revealed
Something upside down in its true form

Jessie's sweeping up something shattered
Fire smoke seems to absolve the evening star
The fern along our path is drying
And following on the first frost
The firs remain the only verdant spires
And following on the first snow
Muting winter quiets would-be sires

And I'm left to imagining the greening
I'm left to questioning the fall.

Jessie calls me to entertain her
Smoke tears dance in my eyes I try to find her
An inverted world leaves a seeker puzzled
Until one sees positioning
As but mere accidents of things

Jessie's warm hand leads, I follow
Revealing shattered glass, a coral, shell
In that mosaic of tears and fragility
I see a dazzling flower
Bursting through this fall from its own realm
I blink and she sees sorrow
I smile, explaining, "winter's at our helm."

Jessie's tears reveal a greening...