​​This past summer, and many other times too, I found myself replaying a line from a song Suzanne and I wrote about 25 years ago.

Just want to let go

let the scar grow

‘cause my hands burn 

from holding the rope

that fragile thread 

that keeps it all together

And we let go . . . 

First I slept and slept and laid around some more drifting in and out, reacquainting myself with the down filled extra wide sofa in our Worcester apartment. Awakening slowly, I felt as if ten years of life had been a dream, often frustrating, often magical, never real. Now, I felt untethered, a balloon out of reach, rising into the sky.

Off, drifting away and over the treetops, not sure I really wanted to land yet, but just to see how far away I could fly.

Eventually gravity brought me back to earth and left me wondering what to do with myself, which surprised me. I’ve always been a very busy guy. For example, I think back to the year 2010 when the kids were single digits, I worked at a local restaurant, wrote a dozen or so newspaper stories per week for a regional publishing company, owned an 1800 farmhouse under constant renovation, coached little league, worked intensively on our backyard farm raising and processing chickens, preserving the extensive harvest of fruits and veggies, homebrewing, helping Suzanne start a community garden, helping a friend start his own farm and . . . whew! I never paused to think I was busy. I didn’t mind at all. To us, this was living! It seemed like everyday the amount of work on our to-do lists grew and we loved it. That’s the way we’ve always been. But not now, and it felt hollow, at first. 

Suddenly, Suzanne and I had time on our hands. She now works only one full time job. At first I spent the days cleaning accumulated dust from several months of no one living here. But in the evening, when we’d have been working at the restaurant hosting what we liked to think of as an amazing and meaningful dinner party five nights a week for the better part of the past decade, instead we sit across a butcher block dinette in our tiny apartment kitchen comfortable in our mutual silence as if rendered mute by a fateful near miss. We find ourselves playing Yahtzee, the roll of the dice an apt metaphor.

Living in Wormtown for the fourth time since 1996, in my seventh apartment, I couldn’t help but feel the need to touch down on some barstools at the old haunts, and some new ones too. And I have been writing about the bars, and the new baseball park for the AAA Red Sox, and many other tidbits that are sidebars to the big story. I have been and will be compiling these stories under a blog titled “A Drinker Must Write.”  Eventually compiling a book of essays from the channel.

But as you know, if you know me at all, I am on a mission. We may not be feeding hundreds of people everyweek and ordering hundreds of pounds of local, sustainable seafood from independent fishermen, or buying five large shares of local farm produce every season, but the necessity of improving our food system is something that remains very compelling. That project is called “All We Can Eat: Win Win Food Stories.” And this email that is replacing the regular Sundrop emails which replaced the regular Homefield email, is what you will now receive, unless you unsubscribe. (I also plan a photo & audio slideshow retrospective of the 10 years spent on the two brew pubs, Homefield and Sundrop.)

Another feeling came back when the miasma lifted. I was hungry.

Gravity has been making a comeback and my feet are back on the ground, but I still feel this shocking lightness of being. At first I thought I felt empty, but now I know it is relief. This is where I wanted to get to when last winter, on a life saving vacation to Aruba, I realized 40 years of slinging hash was enough for one lifetime.