July 10th, 2015 - Carla Schwartz

I awoke alone in the tiny house, our solar-powered houseboat at the Burlington Marina. You had slept in the hotel room we’d taken the night before to escape from our adventure on the water—the noise of the marina, the crowds on the docks, the general party atmosphere at Waterfront Park.

We had been nomads on our three-mile per hour boat for just six nights by then, traveling and anchoring up the lake from Port Henry via DAR State Park, Kingsland State Park, and Shelburne, where we anchored near the Shelburne Inn. We’d arrived in Burlington on the 9th, surfing up the rollers with thirty knot winds at our tail. After docking and renting a slip, we walked the town, re-provisioned at the COOP, and planned to meet friends for dinner. The argument we’d started on the way to get groceries continued on the way to dinner. I don’t remember if we argued because I wasn’t traveling light enough, or something I said, but I tried to calm you as we approached the restaurant and my friends. I was upset and embarrassed. Not only were you scolding me, but you were shouting loudly on a sidewalk. Somehow I dried my tears and we managed a civil dinner with the dear friends you were meeting for the first time. That night, you decided we needed to stay in a hotel. It would give us a nice shower, and hopefully a good night’s sleep away from the marina. But the argument continued, and when I tried to close my eyes to sleep, I couldn’t. I was thinking that our unresolvable argument, whatever it was, could be the unraveling of our relationship. I decided to leave the room and walk back to the marina to sleep on the boat.

I was a little nervous walking alone at night, even in Burlington, a place that had been my home in the late ‘80s and early ‘90s. But things had changed. There were more people hanging around the dark streets at night. I was older. I felt vulnerable. As it turned out, I was perfectly safe. At the marina, I slipped under our ropes, to step off the dock and onto the deck of our boat. I punched in the combination to the front door of our houseboat, and slipped into bed. It was late enough at that point that the noise of the marina had subsided, and I fell into sleep. The next morning, July 10, 2015, I woke with the light, and stretched on our deck in the sun. At about 10:00 am, you stepped onto the boat. I saw immediately something was wrong. Contrition on your face. And then you said the words that changed everything:

My sister called. My father found my mother dead on the bathroom floor this morning.

We hugged. We cried. We let go of anger. Grief and love had stepped in to bond us. And soon you were on your phone making airline reservations for yourself. There was no question you would go and I would stay—your father, a difficult man, didn't like me. As it turned out, he also denied your sister's in-laws attendance at the memorial even after they flew your niece and nephew to Virginia from New York in their private plane.

But that day we had a wordless pact of love. We held hands. We stepped carefully. The day before, we had made plans to meet a young friend, the son of your college buddy, at a bay in North Beach in Burlington on the 10th. Our houseboat was still new then, still being proved. Anyone who came aboard was in awe. We were proud of it, and happy to share the experience with friends. I was planning to cook a vegetarian dinner in the Instant Pot. We didn’t cancel our planned rendezvous. We motored away from the marina and anchored in a quiet cove, where we could swim, paddle board, and relax.

When our young friend arrived at the beach, you went to fetch him with our dingy—our two-seat pedal kayak. We had a wonderful meal. And we all went for an after-dinner swim. The following morning, a friend of mine came to the marina and picked us up to take you to the airport. It was her birthday, and after dropping you off, she and I walked around the farmer’s market. She also drove me down to Port Henry to pick up our car, which, via our deck box folding bicycles, we ended up hopscotching up the lake as we headed north in the weeks to come, so that six weeks later, when we finally arrived at the North Hero Marina where we would have the boat pulled out of the lake, we had a car nearby to drive off in.

I lived more than a week by myself on a slip at the marina, while you took care of things at your father’s house. That gave me time to visit with so many good friends I’d known since I had lived in Burlington all those years before. I had time to practice docking the boat, as I had to move from one slip to another. I had time to work on my blog, Wake With the Sun, named after our boat. I had time to start some of the poems that would form the basis for my collection, Intimacy With the Wind. I’d derived the title from a quote of Wilbur Wright in  David McCullough’s The Wright Brothers, in which he says, and I’m paraphrasing here, that in order to understand flight you have to be intimate with the wind.

Throughout these ten years, we’ve had many more adventures, and of course, arguments, but we’ve learned to navigate them, and I’ve become a better advocate for myself. Our joys outweigh our troubles.

We still swim around our houseboat. We still hold hands.

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Carla Schwartz’s poems have appeared in The Practicing Poet and her collections Signs of Marriage, Mother, One More Thing, and Intimacy with the Wind, and is the recipient of the 2023 New England Poetry Club E.E. Cummings Prize. Recent/upcoming curations: Autumn Sky Poetry Daily, Modern Haiku, New Verse Review, North Dakota Quarterly, One Art, Rattle Magazine, and Sheila-Na-Gig online. She lives half the time in the greater Boston area, and half the time on an unbridged island in Lake Winnipesaukee. Schwartz is passionate about cycling, Nordic skiing, hiking, fresh water long distance swimming, paddle-boarding, pedal kayaking, reading, and gardening. Learn more at carlapoet.com, or on all social media @cb99videos.