For sale: Ashford spinning wheel in excellent condition, two hand-cranked grain mills, a pressure cooker, and a juicer. For free: beer and wine-making equipment, includes bottle capper and corker, bottle caps, corks, airlocks, and tubing. In a cardboard box by the curb with “Please Take!” scrawled on the side in black sharpie: wellingtons, mason jars, Carhartt overalls, farm tools, dog bowl. In the recycle bin: metal lids, wine bottles, shredded journals and letters. In the garbage bin: scraps of cloth for patches, chewed pet toys, broken gadgets, moth-eaten garments, used mouse-traps, worn-out shoes. Donated to Goodwill: army surplus jacket, navy pea coat, heavy wool pants and sweaters, flannel-lined jeans, several knitted hats, scarves, and mittens. Sold to a used bookstore: manuals on gardening, knitting, wine and beer-making, crafting tinctures and creams from herbs, home butchering, raising goats, sheep, and rabbits, and farming on one acre. Gifted to friends: larger pieces of cloth, skeins of yarn, a dehydrator. Given to ex when separating: inflatable kayak, life vest, helmet and oars, sleeping bag and pad, hundreds of signed collectible books, most of the furniture. Donated to the local Shakespeare theatre company: wedding dress. Cast into the Atlantic ocean: three rings.

I shed my past like a snake shedding its skin.

When I moved to North Carolina to live with a man I hardly knew, I left a graduate fellowship at Cornell. My parents were not pleased with this decision, but didn’t push me to reconsider. So, off I went to join my handsome stranger, seeking a romantic adventure inspired by the movie Highlander. Our accommodations were first a tent, then a rented house, eventually a farm on nine acres, purchased the year of our wedding. I met followers of channeled entities, devotees of Bhagwan Rajneesh, survivalists, members of a christian militia, and mountain people. Through reading, trial and error, and sheer muscle, I learned to homestead well. Even now I tell friends, if the apocalypse comes, I’m your woman, though my skills are rusty.

A few years in, I realized this life was too remote and physically demanding for me. More important for my spirit, I didn’t see myself ever becoming part of a community.  What had seemed like a move in a higher moral direction--closer to nature, no tv or internet, living almost off the grid--was taking a toll while working a full-time job an hour away, in partnership with a mercurial person of shifting moods. I expressed my desire to find a place closer to our work, but we didn’t have the means, so we clung on. Eventually, after one crisis too many, over two decades living this way, I forced the move to Asheville. We sold our farm, purchased a small home in the city, and our marriage, already in trouble, ended a year later.

Leaving our farm precipitated some of the sell-off of possessions. The divorce necessitated the rest. I no longer wanted to make everything I consumed--to grow, can, freeze, or dehydrate fruit and vegetables, to assist in the butchering of our animals, to make wine and beer, to spin wool into yarn to knit into garments, to split and stack wood for the woodstoves, to slam my boot through ice to get to the water I needed for the livestock, to scrub out our composting toilet on a winter day and try not to wretch. I no longer wanted to be run down by a life that had become so utilitarian and joyless I was losing myself.

Shedding the past, including those things that served me well but were no longer needed, wasn’t always easy. I enjoyed certain aspects of my former life--running apples through the cider press on a brisk fall day and watching bees hover about the sweet juices, holding trembling newborn lambs in my arms as I helped them take their first milk from their mothers, lying on a grassy hilltop and feeling the sun on my face, looking up to see a pair of hawks circle over the house and neighboring woods. I loved the simplicity and craft of my spinning wheel, slipping carded wool between my fingers onto the bobbin in rhythm with my foot upon the treadle.

But everything had to go so I could release the past. Rather than spiral into regret, weighed down by things that served as mirrors of poor choices or time lost, I chose to remake myself and my surroundings so that I could start again, this time more thoughtfully. I created space to spread my wings wide and follow my dreams. I remember with such vividness being asked by a friend, “What are your dreams?” I was stretched so thin at the time that I told her I didn’t have any. But now I do, so many that if each dream were a balloon, I’d float right up to the moon.