Green Wood Spoon Maker

I met a great friend, Peter Hoeffel, in the early 1990’s. We played music together around Milwaukee as a duo, “The Housewives”. Our friendship revolved around singing, playing guitars, writing songs, laughing, a love of bicycles, drinking coffee, and busking. After spending a lot of time together over a few short years, deeply appreciating our musical connection with each other, I moved away to Vermont where I have remained since. Over the intervening years, we would get together whenever I visited Milwaukee and magically pick up conversation and music right where we left off. It was much the same last spring; one afternoon we sat in Pete’s kitchen having tea, playing guitars, and a few days later enjoying sangria, listening to music, and looking through 90’s memorabilia in his basement. It felt like I could as easily live next door to Pete and pick up a Milwaukee life as if yesterday were the 90’s. A few weeks later when I was back in Vermont, Pete let me know he had been diagnosed with stage 4 colon cancer, and he died 8 short months later. A change I will not likely ever come to grips with, a change that leaves much sorrow for so many.

The things we count on eventually can’t be counted on, and we must adapt. Whether these are material objects, people, concepts, memories…there is little that the simple passage of time doesn’t change. We experience this phenomena on a continuum from barely perceptible change on one end to blunt shock on the other end. 40 years ago, people dumped a bunch of trash on the land and covered it up with dirt and time has exposed the deed. A barn was built with the utmost efficiency of materials and effort 100 years ago, and still stands, shifted and rotten and only still upright by the grace of the thousands of rusty fasteners each doing their part of the job over time. A used steel can is reused as a container nailed to the barn wall, and contains a key to a thing that has been lost over time. We shyly play music together for the first time in public, never imagining the connection that will come, or the loss that will come later, when time has its way. We fix up bikes at the old apartment, and later in time we ride other bikes in the RW24 together. We look in on the dreams of our partners, through the window of a fixer-upper van for sale, and wonder what time will bring.

Treasure what you count on. Treasure what you have, what is real and before you. Your treasure in this world is to be alive, to make, to do, to share and give and love.

Thank you for reading. -Andre Souligny