Words, words, words

All about me people are writing, reading, speaking quietly to each other. The distinctive voice of our bo's'n cuts through two rooms of this rambling coffee joint with some funny tidbit from the news. I laugh to myself and delight in the language that flows all around; a vehicle to carry a little bit of my life back home for others to read.

Joan and I had a nice walk from the boat to get here. I felt very much like nesting on the boat tonight. It is so welcoming and cozy. Seriously though, my life is already steeply slanting toward being sedentary and coming to the coffee shop was a great excuse for a walk and a chance to visit with Joan. She has been the cook on the Clearwater in the past, sailing up and down the Hudson River. She has a rare soft grace and the kindest smile; two distinctive things for a tough, scrappy deckhand on Pride II. We've all been working so insistently that it seems we have slipped into a comfortable peace with each other, without having to dig out the glamour of our individual stories. Little by little the stories will spill forth until all the histories and all the paths that have led us to this boat will meld into a better understanding of who we all are. For now, it's the snippets of time like tonight, when we can visit in the nervous, chattering, falling temperatures of early evening. Joan wants to live out on the West Coast someday and was telling me that sadly, it means she wouldn't be able to have a sugar-bush. I told her the little I know about tapping birch trees for that sweet first sap of Spring. Somehow, that information acted like a piece of scotch tape to patch her someday dreams together for the time being. Who knows? Maybe I'll visit her someday and we'll stir Birch Syrup into tea while swapping harrowing tales of our days as schooner babes on the Pride of Baltimore II.