in my next lifetime

Maybe I'll get to live on this one. Wow. http://www.yachtworld.com/core/listing/photoGallery.jsp?ro=1&slim=quicknull&r=2260498&checked_boats=2260498&rs=yachtworld.com&boat_id=2260498&back=/core/boats/1998/Bristol-GAFF-RIGGED-KETCH-2260498/Prickly-Bay/Grenada&boat_id=2260498

dreaming

I dreamed about a boat last night. She was a little ketch named Larky, and we (the boat and I) were anchored out at Key West Bight. There was cold beer involved. I woke up because?

a Downeast 38 Ketch in Slidell, LA...

sea heather

a few years and counting...

It will be a few years until I can step back on board with an eye to staying a while. At the moment, I still live in the mountains of North Carolina, in a small house with a piano in the parlor and a teenager in the good bedroom. But it is time to start dreaming. The nest is preparing to empty, and when it does, I should be ready to fly. Or float.
I lived aboard years ago, with two children, a cat, and a now ex-husband who shall remain nameless. We moved ashore and sold the boat at the beginning of the long, grueling process that eared he who shall remain nameless his prefix. I started a career in ceramics, the kids went to "normal" schools, and life started over again. But the dreams never stopped. Dreams of endless horizons, the gentle clank of rigging, night-sailing, pilot dolphins, and the gentle rocking of the tides to lull me to sleep.
This blog is about those dreams. In it, I will make notes on boats that I stalk online, see on the Interstate Highway (really!), and visit in person when I make it closer than 700 miles from the natal shores. If you are reading it, I probably invited you personally, and you may or may not be my mother. (You will probably not be a Snort.) Feel free to treat it as a conversation.