Fair Wind was a twenty-three footer, two stories, with a cramped under-deck that smelt of oil and plastic. I got to see it only a few times before my grandparents sold it, and never had the pleasure of taking her out for a spin, but it left an impression nonetheless. It seemed alive somehow, so full of memory it was like to burst.

The Cochranes owned it for the better part of my mom’s teenage years, and liked to spend their family vacations traipsing about New England’s rivers and channels. Up the Hudson to Montreal, down the coast and up into the Chesapeake Bay, to Annapolis and Dover, to Virginia Beach and Baltimore, to everywhere worth going and everywhere of no note, anywhere that was somewhere, there they were.

Their boat held them close together in the dark of the sea, under and above the stars that twinkled in the sky and reflected perfectly on the water. It didn’t care about family feuds, about my uncle’s hormones or the way my mom and aunt always seemed to find something to be at odds about. It was the stitching on the wound, it was the nails that bound their lives fast together. The waters rocked away the pains of yesterday and left no room for anything but a bright blue tomorrow between the waves.

Robert