Disclaimer-work of fiction.

This is fiction. This is an ongoing work of fiction and a writing project about the environmental field, marriage, divorce, and an idyllic childhood. Any similarities to anyone living or dead is a pure coincidence.

Additions to the story

So time passes swiftly with great joy and pain. The island summer, short, sweet and tragic passes into the bright clear and then rainy cold fall. My island home. The wife so described in all the prelude to the joy and pain of my life has gone away to work in a seemingly distant town. My joy at returning to a professional job after amazing all expense paid trips to Vancouver and Calgary quashed for now, for this year, perhaps for always. It is now mid September, 2008. My great rich past, my career and businesses, my love now just bittersweet in my heart.

But the summer was wonderful compared to last year when I was so broke and heartcrushed after the demise of the last trip to New England. That last road trip. This summer I have finally fished for fine, strong mackerel from our city wharf. I love these fighting, fine eating fish. They remind me of small barracuda, but are stronger fighters-they don't give in and must be dragged by strong line still angry and objecting to their death. I like that in a fish-or a man.

There is settlement now with leaving the island, my love and wife of nearly 18 years now, behind. After all I only left Yuma and a great career, now apparently forever lost, to recover my marriage with the only woman I have ever fully loved. But there are new horizons. Returning to Pennsylvania, if the old truck can still take me home, offers the rivers of my youth, the Yellow Breeches, my children and sister.

My children are both working now. Son is in a serious relationship with an attractive spiritual young lady who already has a child. A baby boy. My daughter is working now and may finally be on a journey away to freedom from an oppressive home and mothers ugly man friend. It has only been 3 months since I visited them-in a terror of a trip to attend sons graduation that mother would not allow. But we still took our last years promised fishing trip. A trip promised to be in the original tradition of my trip in my junior year of high school. We didn't make it to all the haunts. But we made it Westline and Kinzua Creek, and Thundershower Run. Finally smiling, my teenage son caught wild glimmering trout in crystal water as we camped. It rained a cold Appalachian plateau summer rain, and we chilled unsleeping our tent, as we had many years ago now on the Arizona rim, at Big Lake. But it was true bonding.

At Homet's Ferry on the Susquehanna I learned that son hated that special place of my youth. To him it represented all the awful times when he, at 5 or 6, was torn apart by the divorce. What a different memory than mine, of idyllic summer days fishing with my father and cousin. As a 9 year old, Wyalusing and the ferry crossing was a fish-filled rural paradise. No matter. We agreed upon my return to the states we find new places special only to us, as Clark's Creek is near Harrisburg, and Yellow Breeches and the fish hatchery are as well. It is interesting as my father introduced me to the breeches in 1965. I think as we had many trips there with both of children during the early Michelle years of 1992 and 1993, his memories are more enjoyable as it pre-dated the ugly and wrong divorce.

But this is about conclusion and moving on. The story has no positive ending, but is not, as yet, a total tragedy. Not yet. You see, as I almost had a very high paying job in hand this summer, Michelle agreed to go with me to Calgary or Vancouver. I would be off to be a Hydrogeologist in the environmental disaster called the oil sands. She would remain as roommate and pseudowife, writing wistful childrens tales of fanciful villages odd people and colourful landscapes. All shaped by her huge heart and love of mirth and children.

But when all of collapsed, and once again my girl was gone and I remained a poor retiree. Alone and for one of the only times in my life-afraid. The agony ceased after the 4 years of losing all I had secular faith in. My own religious conviction strained, as all the signs had been that the world was returning to as a better place than I had left it in March of 2004 when the staggering jail term began because wife one was jealous, and would allow us no quarter and no time with the children my second wife had nurtured and I love so much. Run on sentence intended.

The new plan is still hidden to me. In nightly dreams my mother appears, and sometimes my dad. They are jovial and comforting. My mothers words "Good thoughts and joy for a while. Love is for always. Whatever will be will be". And, "Walk as if you walk hand in hand with God and all things within you will arrange to be well". I have doubted. I have cried the deep cry-when agony is so extreme that no tears flow, and death would have been a welcome respite. But that cry was over my second wife, never over the lost millions, the businesses, homes, cars. my plane. Only a little for the children, as I always knew we would be reunited somewhere, in this or the next life.

Now I am settled that my girl is gone and only a piece of paper constitutes our marriage. Although distant, we are still as close as two people can be, and run to each other when big trials confront us. With all the tears and loss of truth and trust, a bond remains. In all the tears, we are closer than most married couples could ever be or are.

But my pursuit of her and a new professional job are over. At least for this year. I am not sure when or really how I will leave the island. Most of me would be happy once again to curl up in my bed and let the 6 month winter come. But I cannot do that. The process still evades me, both in my soul and materially. But the decision has been made, the line drawn. The old Atlantic fishing map beckons, the voice of my parents, my children. Most of all I will my the beautiful but flawed heart and angel-face of my wife soon not be. Time heals all wounds? No, it does not and cannot. Don't think that if you have the heart of an artist. Maybe if you are a common brute such is possible. I pity and am sometimes envious of the unfeeling. The soulless, the ugly, mean and deceitful. I will continue to love and value that which shaped my being and my life.

But what is a retired scientist who writes poetry and lives on such a rare place as Prince Edward Island. He is me. And I am not changing my soul so someone thinks I am "employable" again. I have too much faith for that. I told son to live in the moment as I have all my life because the moment is all we really have. You can't catch it as it is never there, but passes us by just as we notice it, as a whisper in the wind. He told yesterday "dad, I have lived in the moment and I am happier". A vast step for a bright young man devastated by his mother and by his fathers action and lack of action. But the children know I love them. Perhaps I can still prove it.