I shed the past like a snake sheds skin, like the Fall sheds summer, like the morning sheds the night. I lived in a new Jersey suburb for more than 25 years, and I did not keep a shred of it, not a painting, piece of furniture, not even my grandmother’s dining room table, a treasured link to the past for me.

I lived on a big farm in Hebron, 90 acres, not far from here, and I only have three things from my nine remarkable years there, a small cactus (from the cabin), Orson’s grave marker and this sign, from Lenny, the man I bought the cabin from, and thus began my hero journey out of the normal and into the unfamiliar.

The sign, I was told, hung on his portable bar at the rear of the tiny house with its magnificent view of the mountains.

From the cabin where I ran to the mountain, one thing, this sign, from Lenny,  a much-loved man who told me he loved to drink, and loved to party, and would drink until the day he died. And he died the day I closed on his cabin and changed my life for good.

He kept this sign in his bedroom, and it touched me, and I have kept it with me, it stands on a brass music stand in my study, bound by a bungee cord. We talked once, and he told me about the parties he held in his plastic pool, the truck drivers who would veer far off course to sit and drink with him on the mountain.

For a long time after he died, people stopped by the road looking for Lenny, they wanted to see him and share a beer or some conversation. I was not like Lenny, I was alone for almost all of my time there, hardly anyone ever came to see me, that was how I wanted it.

Along the way, along my journey through life,  I shed every friend, colleague mentor I had every known. There is nothing from Providence or Dallas or New York City or Dallas or Boston or Washington or Baltimore.  Hundreds, thousands of people left behind.

I kept nothing, not a scrapbook of old clips, not an old shirt, not a family photograph,  phone numbers of people, cousins, aunts or uncles. I have more than 52,000 likes on Facebook, and all but a handful are no more than a few years old.

I am in touch with almost no one from the past, and almost no one is in touch with me. I regret it, but I also accept it. Some things cannot be undone. On my mountain, the best friends I had moved away without telling me, and never said goodbye. I have not seen or spoken with them since.

I have left so many people and places, so many have left me.

What does this say about a person like that? I can answer. I had so much work to do, and am doing it still, and will be doing it the rest of my life.

I take photos every day, but I have none that are more than six years old, not a single one. Sometimes I dream that I stepped out of a Twilight Zone episode, through the mirrors of time and into another dimension.

I am not important enough to attract a biographer, but if I did, he or she would be lost, there are just no traces of me, nowhere to start. That has changed, I pushed away almost everything that I loved or that loved me. Or they fled. When I met Maria, I was so alone, she had seen me push so many people away, she was afraid to be with me.

My life imploded, and given the choice of perishing or changing, I changed. I have friends now I will never push away, a partner I will never run from, work that I have done for many years,  boxes of things I cherish and cling to. I do not push people away, I draw them to me when I can. Which is not all of the time, and which is never easy for me. So much safer sometimes, to be alone, to hide in the shadows.

I never stayed in a single job longer than I have written this blog, and I am home now, I believe it is the last place I will ever live. I hope so. I am so lucky, and so aware of it, I am filled with gratitude.

So many people now have just stuck with me now, they don’t really care what I say or do, they see beyond me.

This sign makes me want to cry ever time I see it, it never gets old or stale for me, the power of it never fades. For all the years since I bought that cabin – 15 years – I have given up everything I ever had, money, too, but I have never lost sight of this sign, this worthless thing, I have never thought to throw it away, put it in a drawer, give it to some.

Why would this be the one thing I have clung to, the one thing that connects me to a lifetime in shadows and memory. I feel sometimes that I was a refugee in my own life, a ghost in my own time, I spent a lifetime surviving, I have only recently begun to live. I was so sick, I think.

I don’t  really know. No one but Maria and Lenny and his friends has ever seen this bar sign. It is unabashedly simple and tacky, a statement all of its own.

There is something defiant about it, it is a manifesto, a determination to live life fully and in joy, and without apology. Everyone on the mountain loved this man, when he died he was missed and mourned. When I moved, there was no one to say goodbye to, I simply left and never came back. When I left Hebron for our new farm, there were no farewells, I have driven by once, I have never gone back.

I never go back.  I am uncomfortable with nostalgia, my head is in the present, I live almost every day as if it were one of my last. The past is a dark tunnel for me, there are no lights in the past, no way out of the tunnel.

Today, the afternoon sun shot through the window and landed on my sign, in the far corner of my study. Perhaps because it speaks to my past, and connects me to all of that pain and confusion, perhaps that is the reason it is still here and I can’t bear to part with it. And I can’t bear to think of it, either.

It is a voice that whispers in my ear, and says so softly  remember, remember, remember.