A year of living.

[Wayne in Maine]

Packing up...

We have started our move to Pennsylvania. We packed several dozen boxes with books, and donated half again as many to the local Goodwill. We also loaded some portable fencing and our maple evaporator for Franzi and Dickon to enjoy. I also sold 10 of my Coleman lanterns to a collector. I made a small profit, he got some real prizes and we are both happy for the transaction.The house is slowly (very slowly) looking emptier.

We cleared a lot of space in our garage. At this point, as we pack, we will load everything onto pallets and wrap them for shipping. When we have 6 pallets ready, Dickon will sent a truck up (which holds 6 pallets). That will make the move easy. Local folks who want to help can simply come by and move boxes and other items to the pallets.

While we were packing I cam across a box full of old (sorted by date) correspondence going back to when we first started attending a Mennonite church and from the start of our Anabaptist sojourn. I found a copy of a letter of introduction I sent to our own George Donner, letters I exchanged with J. C. Wenger, Steven Scott, and Steven Nolt (while he was still a student, not a professor and author at Elizabethtown College). I also came across correspondence with a variety of Bruderhof people when we started our visiting and seeking there.

It's been a long strange trip indeed!

[Bootstrap]

While we were packing I cam across a box full of old (sorted by date) correspondence going back to when we first started attending a Mennonite church and from the start of our Anabaptist sojourn. I found a copy of a letter of introduction I sent to our own George Donner, letters I exchanged with J. C. Wenger, Steven Scott, and Steven Nolt (while he was still a student, not a professor and author at Elizabethtown College). I also came across correspondence with a variety of Bruderhof people when we started our visiting and seeking there.

It's been a long strange trip indeed!

Can you tell us about this time? I'd love to hear about it.

[Wayne in Maine]

While we were packing I cam across a box full of old (sorted by date) correspondence going back to when we first started attending a Mennonite church and from the start of our Anabaptist sojourn. I found a copy of a letter of introduction I sent to our own George Donner, letters I exchanged with J. C. Wenger, Steven Scott, and Steven Nolt (while he was still a student, not a professor and author at Elizabethtown College). I also came across correspondence with a variety of Bruderhof people when we started our visiting and seeking there.

It's been a long strange trip indeed!

Can you tell us about this time? I'd love to hear about it.

The oldest letter in the collection dates from 1984. That was the year I was trying to make some decisions about my future - to go to University to study Engineering or ??? We had already had been spoiled on "churchianity" with our radical evangelical / intentional community experiences and I think at that time we were feeling a bit of a tug back. I was working in a shop building custom wheelchairs and other therapeutic equipment while going to school part time in preparation for Engineering school, Betty had finished her Nursing degree and was at the same institution, Walter E. Fernald State School. We lived in Salem Massachusetts, within a stones throw of the harbor - I could view Marblehead from my third floor apartment across the harbor.

The letter, from the "Plough Publishing House, Hutterian Society of Brothers, Rifton New York"

Dear Friend,

Warm thanks for your generous response to the Plough mailing. You will be receiving your copy of Eberhard Arnlold [God's Revolution] as well as the Plough magazine and other info you requested.

Rifton is on Route 213, between New Paltz and Kingston. You may also be interested to know about our community in Norfolk Conn., just off Rt. 44 between Winsted and Canaan. Do us a favor and let us n know by mail when you wish to visit.

We look forward to staying in touch!
Warmly, Dana Wiser

I was accepted into University of Lowell the following year with two years credit for my previous college credits. I was the only transfer student advanced into the Sophmore year of the Electrical Engineering program as they were way over enrolled already. It was all because I won the A+ from my Calculus 2 teacher at the North Shore Community college for finishing with a grade point over 100% and for beating out the only other student in the class with such a high average on the extra-credit problem on our final exam. Dr. Roger Bauman at U-Lowell said "Anyone who can get an A+ in Calculus 2 from Dr. Dube is welcome in my program."

We still had not found a church, and my studies were grueling for the next 4 years, so we had no time or energy for any church, the Bruderhof or Radical Evangelicalism until after I graduated. We then discovered that a Mennonite church had started in Massachusetts, about 25 miles from us, which we first visited in March, 1990. That's another part of the story. But a few letters into the folder I have this from the Woodcrest Bruderhof:

Dear Friends,

Thanks so much for your note of June 11. We are glad to get asquainted with our Plough readers.

Yes, you would be welcome to visit sometime during the week of July 1-8. Please let us know which days would suit you best. Meanwhile I'm enclosing a bit more literature.

Warmest Greetings, Ellen Keiderling for the Woodcrest Bruderhof

So started another adventure on this long strange trip!

[Wayne in Maine]

Day 1 of therapy session 4.

Today I started immunotherapy along with chemotherapy. The immunotherapy is different from the more experimental therapies I originally thought it was. This simply turns off a t-cell inhibitor in my body that would otherwise prevent my body from attacking cancer cells with particular genetic factors. Since we are turning part of my immune system on it can have "autoimmune" effects. I finished the infusion about 20 minutes ago and I'm on my chemo (5FU). I did not have an immediate bad reaction to the immunotherapy drug which is a relief. We might be cutting my chemo out early (with its three associated drugs!) and just do the immunotherapy.

Of course adding a new therapy extends my time at the cancer center. I came in at 11 and don't expect to be home until 4.

I'm enjoying reading my recent literary acquisition, "Sources of South German / Austrian Anabaptism". With an excellent 51 page introduction, which now has a lot of my marginal scribbles and highlights, I won't get to the main text for a bit. But days 3 and 4 are dedicated entirely to rest and reading. So I have something to look forward to later in the week.

Being here for a long session I'm seeing a lot of other patients come and go for their therapy. Some people have it pretty rough compared to what I'm going through.

[Wayne in Maine]

This will be our 23 summer at "Want-Not Farm", our little Maine homestead. This year there is no garden, the hoop house has been sold, even the little Troy-Built tiller I bought last year is gone. For sale is the little tractor and tiller I used when we had a market garden and all our poultry raising equipment. My beekeeping gear is being consigned to others, my daughter's family has taken our maple evaporator and sap gathering equipment. Still there's a lot of equipment left, a barn full: buckets, sprayers, buckets, fencing, hand tools, buckets, trellises and buckets. It's simply not easy making this stuff go away! Does anyone need some good clean food grade buckets?

Betty and I still won't get out of our habit of taking a weekend drive, in spite of the work we have to get done. We prefer to do this on Saturday morning. Yesterday we drove again to Rockland. I had a couple things to buy for the boat, and we knew the tourist shops would be open - there are a couple Maine mementos we are looking for to decorate our new home. It's starting to hit us that we are going away from our beloved Maine, and we miss her already.



We bought lunch at the Rockland Cafe and ate at the roadside picnic area that overlooks lower Penobscott bay and Islesboro. It surprises me that the cafe is not an overcrowded tourist mecca. Aside from being a most genuine "local" type hangout, it has some amazing food. Betty had a Lobster BLT and I enjoyed their seafood lasagna for the first time since the pandemic kept us away from crowded little restaurants.

We had both intended to take a brief nap when we got home before tackling some more moving chores. Betty got a long nap, I ended up on some phone calls and texts. I needed the nap, but managed to push through the lousy feeling I experience on my chemotherapy day 5. We tackled reorganizing the garage which we are setting up as a "shipping department". I got a batch of good pallets locally; we will pack and load everything onto the pallets then let our son in law know when we are ready for him to send a truck for a pickup. The engineer in my like the efficiency of it! I expect 6 truckloads should get us out of here. Everything will get unloaded into the garage of our Pennsylvania place and in June we will head down there to start unpacking before returning to Maine to finish getting Want-Not farm prepped for sale.

The boat is still waiting for me to finish up installing electronics and some tie-downs for safety equipment. We'll see her in the water in a couple weeks. Our youngest daughter is coming home from Colorado to help out for a week or so and our son gets back from sea next weekend. We'd enjoy taking them out for a ride - maybe even right up to our back yard if the tide is right!

[justme]

It's starting to hit us that we are going away from our beloved Maine, and we miss her already.

change can be hard. especially moving away from something that is loved.
are you going to change your MN name to Wayne -not in- Maine?

[Wayne in Maine]

It's starting to hit us that we are going away from our beloved Maine, and we miss her already.

change can be hard. especially moving away from something that is loved.
are you going to change your MN name to Wayne -not in- Maine?

Betty and I chatted about this today. Thinking about missionaries, especially Mennonite farmers who are settled in their family setting, we realize that this is not such a sacrifice, if I can do “Kingdom work” for the duration.

My latest joke is about giving the rest of my life to such Kingdom work. Okay, I’ll admit it is a short life to give, but it is the rest of my life after all! It’s all I’ve got!

I will not change my MN name. I will continue to honor the dear old State of Maine and hope that someday an authentic first generation Anabaptist presence will take root and thrive there.

[Wayne in Maine]

While one group promotes obedience to Scripture and throws out maybe too much of the science, the other group does the inverse.

Okay, I threw out science! I had a good old fashioned book burning today!

[Soloist]

While one group promotes obedience to Scripture and throws out maybe too much of the science, the other group does the inverse.

Okay, I threw out science! I had a good old fashioned book burning today!

Proverbs 9:8

[appleman2006]

One of my regrets is not being able to visit you in your home in Maine. Our plan had been to do an eastern province trip last summer and then swing down that way. Of course that all got cancelled.