First Night
As one whose profession required quite a bit of travel, I never really had a problem sleeping in a new place. There were times when I had a different hotel room every other night, before flying back home late Friday, to start again on Monday. But being retired from that for a couple of years now, I find that being in a new place has begun to have the same fascination that it had when I was a kid.
My grandparents house was built in the 1890s. It had 13 foot ceilings and windows that filled much of that height. It had a Franklin wood stove in one of the bedrooms, beadboard chair rail in the kitchen, a cast iron claw foot bathtub, a brass light fixture that was once lit with gas but later converted to electricity, a wrap around front porch with swing, a huge garden, and a pecan tree that touched the sky. It was a place of wonder. Well, I was a kid at the time. Still, a weekend at grandma’s took a bit of getting used to. The creaks and squeaks of the wood floors, the smells of whatever had been for dinner lingering through the house, the drone of the window air conditioner in the hall, were different than home. Not bad, not really scary; just different.
Dinner on Kotona consisted of Caesar salad with chicken and a very cold beer. A welcome respite after a somewhat disappointing day of projects that couldn’t quite be finished. The steering cables that I thought just needed adjusting, actually need replacing. The bilge pump that I thought just needed a new handle, actually needs a new diaphragm too. The mildew that I thought was confined to one locker, wasn’t. Still, coulda been worse; and that beer was really cold.
It’s cooler this evening than it was the first time I tried to spend the night on our new-to-us E31 Independence. That night was hot and humid with no breeze at all. As I’m writing this, it’s 69F, and should cool off a bit more before morning. There’s conversation across the way from a boat that just returned from an afternoon on the lake. There’s cicadas and frogs in the trees. It’s a nice place to be.
Outside the marina, the world is what the world is. But here on the water, here in the cabin, it’s not so bad. Looking around, the Cole stove and brass oil lamps remind me of that long gone Franklin stove and brass light fixture. The wood beadboard ceiling is almost the same color as that chair rail. The v-berth is surprisingly comfortable. And you have to climb just a bit to get into it - just like the bed at Grandma’s. The open overhead hatches, along with the cabin fans, are providing a nice breeze. Tomorrow will be more projects, but tonight… I think I’ll sleep just fine.