Juxt-suppose

You could say life changed for us after the fire.

My dad was well crazy by this point so it didn't take much to convince my mom to leave him. An idea that I had championed for years.

She gathered her strength and the insurance money and bought a 31 foot sailboat for our new home. Since we had lost pretty much everything in the fire, it wasn't all that difficult to move straight on to the boat.

You might think a 31 foot boat is huge...until you try living in that space every day. It just gets smaller and smaller until you feel like you're losing your mind. It was just the two of us and our dog but sometimes it felt like a family of 12.

Try taking a shower sitting on the toilet in a 2x2 bathroom - and you'll see what I mean. One wrong move and you've got a bilge pump handle straight up your hoo-ha.

Or making quesadillas during a storm. Or hot chocolate. Or anything. A gimbaled stove is a great invention but it doesn't mean anything if your legs aren't gimbaled too.

In many ways I didn't appreciate the boat or what it took my mom to make a leap like that.

You might say that I was a "hateful little bitch" when I was 13.

You might say that...if you were my mom.

I was, I'll admit it.
NOW.
But not back then.
Back then I was angry because I wasn't like the other kids at school.

For chrissakes I lived on a BOAT. How weird was that!?

While everyone else had a DINING ROOM, a KITCHEN - actual ROOMS, I had a aft cabin and a 6x3 bunk. I couldn't even sit up, I had to lay flat ALL the time. Sometimes if I had a nightmare I would sit bolt upright in bed and find goose eggs on my forehead that would put Willy Wonka to shame.

It was pretty tough in inclement weather schlepping our groceries all the way down to the end of the dock (of course we lived at the END of the dock. Of course).

Not only that but we didn't have the traditional refrigerator like most people did. We had what they called in the boat business, a "cooler".

Essentially it was a hole in the counter you could put ice in and then throw your food on top of. A novel invention but not for the faint of heart. Things got lost in there and it was NOT pretty when they were discovered again. Sometimes months later.

At any rate, the blocks of ice were close to 15 pounds apiece and melted pretty fast. We would have to make several trips a week just to keep food semi-cold. I got good biceps those years.

And water? Well now, water was another story.
For that we had a water tank which needed manual filling. It was quite tricky.

You had to take a regular garden hose, hook it up to a water spout somewhere on the dock, then stick the other end into the resevoir and fill it to capacity. Wait approximately four days for the water to get hot then take a shower. On the toilet.

All in all, living on the boat was a lot like camping. Every day.

I really shouldn't complain I mean, it WAS truely beautiful all the time. Even when it was raining there was something stunning happening around me.

And when we were out on the open water, it was a completely different world.

There were many times I would be sitting on the bow of the boat, listening to music or reading a book, and look down to see pods of porpoise playing in the wake trying to get my attention. Talk about oneness with the world! They would look up at me with their sweet little eyes and (being the perverbial "cloudtalker" that I was) I was pretty sure I could read their thoughts.

I felt like I grew a lot in those four years living on the water. It really does do something to your blood.

Not only did it show me how little material possessions mattered (and they don't, not when your bunk is 6x3) but how much magic there is in the natural world around us. How much life, how much spirit, how it's all interconnected.

How if you listen with your heart and look with your soul you really can hear and see everything.

Even as a hateful 13 year old girl I was able to see it.

Maybe- just maybe, it was that juxtaposition of light and dark. The yin and yang. The good vs. evil.

I went from a place of darkness and bad energy to the most beautiful place in the world. From Satanic rituals and soul grippers to earth and wind and water and freedom.

What does this mean then? That there's hope for everybody? I guess in a sense it does.

They say that you can't appreciate the light without the dark, a rose without the thorns, or a rainbow without the rain. And that which doesn't kill you makes you stronger.

It's taken me a long time to get there but I think I can finally see the forest through the trees.

The secret is taking all of the things that didn't kill me and putting them in their proper places.

To guide myself and others with our light, our roses and our rainbows.

And to once and for all, get strong.