Tag: essay
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Fishing
“Where’s your husband?” asks a stocky, mustachioed man halting before me. He holds a long fishing rod in one hand. With a mouth full of burrito de machaca, I gesture to the butcher shop across the street. He moves on down the Loreto sidewalk, twirling his reel. It’s hot, but I’m too hungry to find…
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Swingin’ on a (Gulf)Star
To get to Habibi, you must pass Enchantment, Namaste, Alley Cat, and Go Dog Go! Every single time I return to her — from swimming or grocery shopping or marina business — I grin, relieved she’s still floating, amazed that she’s mine. Yep, it’s dawning on me that, after 42 years of searching, I finally…
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Step Away
“Step away from my brother’s grave,” I say. Two women have approached his headstone while I am at the water spigot by the road. One has her phone out and leans over, snapping photos. The other picks up the bubble wand lying next to a large lit candle. They ignore me. “Step away from my…
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Tink
Habibi has a side-kick, Tinkerbell the dinghy. Tink for short, rhyming with ‘dink’, which is what some folks call their dinghies. She’s a wooden rowboat with oars. “You need a motor,” said Francisco from the guard shack. I was returning with provisions from the big city (Loreto, about 18 highway miles away, population 20K). “I am…
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Heard
Anxiety is finally taking a back seat. Feels like years that she’s been driving me around. But now I have a home — Habibi of the Sea. And time and space to write. A publisher contacted me recently. She’s interested in Letters to Lulu, the epistolary novella I penned in 2013, the same year I evacuated…
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Gifts
I finally left the harbor — yahoo! Habibi came through torrential rains and gale force winds just fine! Nothing shifted, nothing broke, the mooring held. The holding tank leaked a little because I’d been working on it and hadn’t tightened the lid enough. But all the hatches stayed battened until I opened them to the…
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Hilary
My mother did not evacuate New Orleans before Katrina hit and the levees failed. She hunkered down in the first floor bathtub. She had cleared out — unnecessarily, in hindsight — many times before, she explained, so she decided to stay. “River of misery,” she saw afterwards. Followed by “river of joy,” the following Mardi…
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Breathe
“When the ball comes fast — breathe.” This I heard in a San Diego park, near tennis courts, and recognized the instructor’s good advice. The balls are coming fast these days in this noisy marina on the Sea of Cortez: contracts to sign, settlement statements to question, stolen credit card numbers to report, a fallen…
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Velerista
Balanced. Smooth. Minor hull blistering. A bit of rust. A quality build. Satisfactory condition. These are the key words I took away from the sea trial and haul-out of Habibi last week. Yahoo! Two days with the marine surveyor, who crawled into and inspected every nook and cranny. We tested the engine, steering, navigation electronics,…
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Come Sail Away
Sometimes it takes a long time to get back to all right. Been ten years since I exited Olympia and began looking for a home by the sea. Took awhile to realize I could choose a boat instead of a house. Today I wired a 10% deposit on Habibi and contacted a marine surveyor to…
