Two friends

Two friends passed away this fall-
Katharina Kuhn who lived with her husband Alfons and their son Ben on their farm in Wyman, and Aaron Lemon, who had lived in several spots in the Pontiac with his wife Cecile and their daughter Terry.  Of all the places Aaron lived, he loved most the farm "L'Ancestral" in Mansfield.  He spoke often of getting up in the morning and looking first out over the flatland to the Ottawa River and then turning in the opposite direction to look up at the high wooded hills, "the mountain" he called it.
Both Katharina and Aaron put much more into my life than I did to theirs, I am afraid.
Katharina and Alfons were among the first people my wife and I came to know when we moved to the Pontiac in the early '70s.  We shared many meals together, several Christmases.  We also shared a determination to make our respective farms flourish, to work hard, to raise our families in that
environment.  I felt a further bond with Katharina due to her earlier work in the Bread & Puppet Theater and our appreciation of literary things.

There was a similarity here also in my friendship with Aaron Lemon.  I first came to know him when we were both working for the Ministry of Agriculture in southern Ontario.  I was teaching and Aaron was engaged in research in alternative sources of energy, a subject I found very interesting.  We, too, shared a literary connection, as Aaron was an accomplished writer and a man knowledgeable in music especially jazz.  We had many discussions of writers, poets, and music.  Aaron, Cecile, and Terry moved to the Pontiac after they visited us here and fell in love with this region.  Aaron was a magnificent dreamer, and one of his most powerful dreams was to build a farm using that crucial combination of the old and the new-recycling, using the flow of the seasons and natural forces, with the results of the latest research in materials and techniques.  How stimulating it was to listen to his encyclopedic knowledge of both conservation and new experimentation.

Katharina Kuhn also cultivated an element of magnificence in her life, something we seldom find in our own lives or in the lives of many around us.  It doesn't fall out of the sky, and both Katharina and Aaron combined this natural gift with genuine hard work and focus to nurture it within their families and careers.  Although I know little of real "wise women", I would say that of everyone I have met in my life, Katharina comes the closest to what we might expect in a wise woman-the intensity of her engagement with being alive made her face and her being shine.  Her friends all commented on this quality, this glow, even in the last year when she fought against the overwhelming forces of the worst that life can throw at us.  The last time I saw her, several weeks before her passing, she radiated, and I couldn't believe she could possibly die with so much energy and determination.  I knew she would, however, and this contradiction of the forces lined against her, facing her immense and fragile glow, remains with me today as a numbing paradox-and tragedy.

So too, with Aaron.  I had lost physical contact with Aaron in the last years of his life, although he never ceased to be a presence, like a guide, quietly nudging my thoughts as I rushed on like the busy fool I am.  These two people continue on as both presence and paradox, especially when I compare the intensity and quality of their lives, and the priorities they held up for the rest of us, we who have life but also have less.