Tag: essay
-
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…
-
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…
-
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…
-
Dusk
A faint path lopes along the top of the isthmus that separates the mooring lagoon from the sea. I didn’t notice it for a month, and trudged the rougher scree that tried to throw me off balance. Imagine my delight one evening, in the slanting rays, to find an easier way. And it was always…
-
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…
-
In Praise of Floating Boat Hooks
A piece of advice: given the choice of letting go of the boat hook or releasing the mooring line, always release the mooring line! Otherwise the current and Habibi’s momentum will wrench the boat hook from your grasp (which you’ve used to catch the line), and you will watch with dismay as both line and hook…
-
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…
-
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…
-
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…
-
Lessons
Put the dinghy together before throwing it overboard. (So that’s what ‘nested pram’ means! Three hours, use of the hoist, and many cuts and bruises later…) Swivel the grill inside the stern pulpit (the back of the boat) before leaving the dock so it doesn’t catch on your neighbor’s lifelines (horizontal cables running the length of the boat). (But…
words & art by shé 