In early 2019, I was almost 65 years old, and I continue my process of dying, like everyone else born in this world. I’m currently expecting that it will take until I’m well over 90 years old, and at that point I’ll reassess the schedule.  The following summary (2019) touches on events that deserve much more detailed stories, and some of those will hopefully be written.   

I’m currently living in Freeport, Maine, where my wife Jenny Yasi and I bought our house in October, 2015.  We met on Peaks Island in 1984, got married there in 1985, and spent almost a year on our honeymoon to the country of Jamaica and Boulder, Colorado.  We’ve had a lot of fun since then, too.

On returning, we lived for a couple of years in one of the units of a triple-decker apartment building on Park Street in Portland that I partially owned.  We sold that property to buy land on Peaks Island where we built a passive solar home in 1989, while living in a nearby rental house on Peaks.  After our two daughters had moved away for college, we moved to Bowdoinham in 2010, then back to our house we still owned on Peaks in 2012.  We also bought a smaller Peaks Island home that we fully renovated in 2013, living there after the solar house was sold in 2014.  After landing in Freeport in 2015, we sold the smaller Peaks Island house in 2016. 

Our first daughter Sophia Elizabeth was born on July 25, 1987 in Portland, so she spent some time in Portland and Peaks before we all moved into the solar house in 1989.  Our daughter Echo Alethea was born on May 27, 1990 in the Peaks Island house with the help of many neighbors and a midwife, a VBAC birth.  The girls attended the Peaks Island Elementary School through grade 5, then took the ferry into the public schools, graduating from Portland High School.  Sophi lives in Bath, Maine, with her husband Travis Swaim and their two children, Felix Peter (born August 11, 2013) and Hazel Mae (born August 25, 2015).  Echo lives in Baltimore, Maryland.  We love how they are living their lives.

My parents told me I was born on April 11, 1954 at Sibley Hospital in Washington, D.C.  My Dad, James Cawood Presgraves (1917-2002,) grew up in Washington and my mother, Sarah Louise Smith (1914-2011,) was from Connecticut.  I was Mom’s first child, followed by Andrew Carrington in 1956, and Donald Cawood in 1959.  Andrew and his family have lived in Leesburg, Virginia for many years.  Donald and his family have lived in Newton, Alabama (near Dothan) for many years.  

In the April before Donald was born, my family moved to Potomac, Maryland from Hyattsville.  We stayed in Potomac for almost 20 years, through a huge suburban development boom, and where my brothers and I went to the public schools.  After Donald finished high school, in 1977 Mom and Dad moved to Beaufort, SC and enjoyed their retirement life there for over 20 years.  In 1998, they moved to a new house on Donald’s property in Alabama. 

I graduated from Winston Churchill High School in 1972, and then had the very good fortune to attend the University of Virginia, which changed my life.  While at UVA, I enjoyed and organized outdoor adventures including whitewater canoeing, rock climbing, hiking, camping and skiing, and I helped start the Hang Gliding Club, among other things.  I received a degree of Bachelor of Science in Civil Engineering in May, 1976.  I moved back to my parent’s house for over a year while I worked at a small survey/ engineering company in Calvert County, Maryland, and then got a job with McCrone Engineering in Annapolis.   I bought a house in Eastport (“center of the universe”), sailed frequently with friends, and soon bought my own 25 foot sailboat named Recycle. In 1980, I passed the exam to become a Professional Engineer, promptly quit my job and sailed away in Recycle for the Bahamas; see that story.   

In 1981, I moved to Peaks Island, Maine, where some friends had started the STAR Foundation that owned a property containing a WW2 ruin known as Battery Steele.  The STAR Foundation was founded as the Sustainable Technology and Applied Research Foundation, promoting alternative energy and appropriate resource use.  I worked over the summer of 1981 as the supervisor of a group of young people on a project to build two passive solar greenhouse structures and start a community garden.  The Foundation promoted recycling and did a few other good things before fading away.  I worked for SEA Consultants in Boston for a year and then in Portland until 1985.  In 1994, Jenny and I helped start the Peaks Island Land Preserve which purchased the Battery Steele property, and now owns or has conservation easements on over 170 acres on the island which has a total area of about 720 acres. 

After returning to Portland and Peaks Island from our honeymoon in 1986, I re-started my engineering career at Woodard & Curran, beginning as a Design Engineer and leaving in 2002 as a Senior Project Manager.  Much of my experience at W&C was in the solid waste management area, including a lot of landfill closure projects, most for relatively small municipalities.  One particularly interesting project was on Vinalhaven Island in Maine in 2000.  In 2015, I sailed there and visited the closed landfill which had become a natural art installation [see photos].   Jenny and I would like to visit there in the future— the island, not necessarily the closed landfill.

I loved my next career position as the Town Engineer for Freeport, Maine, and the job expanded to include Solid Waste Director and Public Works Director, before retiring in 2016.  As the first full-time person in the Town Engineer position, I was able to establish a good foundation for the role, doing a wide variety of projects and activities.  I enjoyed the residents and features of Freeport so much that Jenny and I moved there in 2015.  

Sailing has been an important part of my life, starting in childhood with my parents who owned a series of sailboats, and where we spent many weekends sailing on the Chesapeake Bay, mostly out of Solomons Island.  After my experience with Recycle in Annapolis and farther, I sailed on Other Peoples Boat’s (OPB’s) in Maine for several years, with Peaks Island being a great place to enjoy that.  There is a very active community of boaters on the island, and the annual Round the Island fun-race is still being run every Labor Day Sunday, now associated with the Trefethen-Evergreen Improvement Association, TEIA.   

In 2000, Jenny and I bought a custom version of a Southern Cross 31 cutter named Harbor Bell.  In the summers, we and the girls sailed throughout Casco Bay, with a couple of trips down to Cape Cod and Martha’s Vineyard.  As soon as Harbor Bell was sold in 2007, we began looking for our next boat.  We found the motor-sailor Magus in Puerto Rico, and decided to buy the boat while there on vacation.  Echo was with us and also looked at the 1971 boat saying “You will never have a moment of free time if you buy this” but that has not been completely true.  Since the internet was available by then, many of the adventures with Magus are available here.         

In college, I moved on from my High School Christian phase into a self-study in various mystical pursuits including the writings of Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, and I learned about the Perennial Philosophy which views all of the world's religious traditions as sharing a single, metaphysical truth or origin.   This all led to a bunch of New Age interests that Jenny could not support.  She did like Buddhism, and we both began to study Buddhism in the tradition of Thich Nhat Hanh, with the girls, of course.  Jenny and I both received mindfulness training certificates in 1997.  I regret that I did not always demonstrate my awareness of those teachings, as Jenny knows too well.

I had many other interests that I shared with Jenny including organic gardening, the environment, social equality, community, politics, travelling, and that kind of thing.  I love people and value the friends I have known over my life, especially the ones that I’m still in touch with.  In recent years, I have taken a strong interest in the history of human beings, in all our diversions, confusions, expressions.  It is amazing to realize that our history is composed of random actions/ occurrences that lead to the next thing that is “naturally” selected by peoples’ choices that they had to make based on all of their experience (and environment) to that point in time.  And so it will continue into the future.  Love.