Retreat to the Countryside

So when we headed up north, we weren't really on the run, but we knew that our neighbors may have been. My problem with Davy seemed to have been completely forgotten but was not. It was simply put onto the back burner like many other problems in our lives only to reappear later. But the distractions we encountered in the city were somehow worse in the country. For one thing we were older and much more desperate for love than we were in the city as youngsters. And for another, we had fewer friends and places to go - sometimes with many miles of travel between them - so the gravity of our encounters was urgent.

We moved to an area just south of our old Scout campgrounds in Stacy where the Sunrise River took a tortuous path to the southwest to find Elk River and eventually the Mississippi. So we actually did end up going 'up the river'. Not to a facility like real criminals, but to a place 'out of the way', in an area where I was less likely to do damage. My friend Steve, who had two sisters, lived upstream from the pond by Sand Lake on Hay Lake, and a spring fed Sand lake that ran into the creek by our house and west to the pond, and from the pond northwest to Hay Lake.

So when my friend Steve's dad poured lead from his furnace into a crucible about 5 years after we arrived, I realized that we hadn't really solved the problems we left behind at all. As a matter of fact, by being removed from the location where they began, it seems that someone chose to expose the true nature of the crime we lived by placing a laundry basket next to the furnace with a small puddle of milky-white semen in the crotch of a pair of pink panties. Admittedly, by that time, I had learned how to accomplish a leak of that kind all by myself, so the fear of discovery was not lost upon me, but both Steve and his dad were calm and cool as ever.

After we moved, we believed we had a new network to work with by changing the people and the place where we lived and we do, but back then it didn't make much difference. Like lessons we fail to learn, they keep returning until we slow down long enough to pay close attention to what needs tending. And if we continue to ignore the significance of someone by the same name used to describe the same, or a similar problem then cleaning carpets in Apple Valley won't have any meaning or significance for me, or anyone else, and marketing Carpet Protectors in Stillwater won't lodge as a complaint in my thick skull either.