Home is Where We Tie Up
...Returning to the Chesapeake after twenty-five years
Would you change anything about your life if you knew you only had two years left?
Richard and I ask each other this question from time to time — a small ritual to make sure we’re steering the same course. It’s led to career leaps, cross-country moves, rekindled friendships, and choices we might’ve otherwise left to drift. If you have a spouse or partner, I highly recommend the exercise.
Too often, we make decisions based on assumptions about what the other wants, and inertia can lock us into a life that could use a good, intentional stirring.
Years ago, this question felt like a harmless thought exercise. Today, it lands with more gravity.
Last fall, I asked him again after another Okoboji Writers' and Songwriters' Retreat — an all-consuming project.
He answered, almost wistfully, “I’d love to have a boat on the Chesapeake again.”
When we first connected in 2000, he had a blue-hulled sailboat with varnished teak rails and a Weems and Plath oil lamp casting a warm light over the cockpit that first night I came aboard. The boat lived in a slip in Annapolis, the same place where we began to build our life together.
It didn’t take long. We shuffled priorities, scanned endless listings, and plotted a new dream, incorporating part of our lives together for the first time: Iowa and Maryland, not Maryland or Iowa.
These days, hoisting sails on a windy day sounds like a surefire way to wrench a back, so we traded canvas for comfort: a slow and steady trawler with an engine that sips instead of guzzles.
Six months later, here we are — back where it all started, 25 years later. (I just typed that and had to sit with it: twenty-five years.)
Our young pup has claimed the boat as his own, bounding up and down the gangway with his rainbow-colored stuffed worm and teddy bear. He is home, wherever we are.
Outside, the wind picks up, slapping halyards against masts up and down Back Creek. The lines sing their odd metallic chorus — a marina soundtrack that can seem chaotic but becomes soothing in time.
The gusts gently tug our boat against the dock. It feels familiar—a reclamation of a time when the power of nature was real, remembered even if buried.
Most of us spend our days in dwellings or office buildings, shielded from the sounds and smells of nature.
A small squall moved through here a couple of hours ago, cleansing the deck of pollen and dropping the temperature about 15 degrees. In our ordinary lives, we miss noticing these things when cooped up inside a building where air has to be ‘conditioned.’
Nature is calling us. It feels timeless in an uneasy period of history.
On water, we are no longer on solid ground. And maybe that's the point.
Yes, the world feels precarious right now, to all of us. But there’s serenity in knowing we’re doing our small part to improve things while accepting that our powers are finite.
And sometimes, simply coming home—to each other, to the water—is enough.
What would you change if you knew you had just two years to live?
Substack Success:
Build, Grow, and Monetize Your Column
June 11, 18, & 25, 2025
and I will also be conducting a three-session virtual course through Story Summit on how to launch your successful Substack column. Learn moreOkoboji Writers’ and Songwriters’ Retreat
We’ve added a new speaker to the roster of exceptional teachers during the Okoboji Writers’ and Songwriters’ Retreat.
Elizabeth Kracht is a literary agent with Kimberley Cameron & Associates and has an MFA (in fiction) from San José State University. She is also the author of The Author’s Checklist: An Agent’s Guide to Developing and Editing Your Manuscript (New World Library, 2020). Elizabeth also works as a freelance developmental editor, coaching writers. She is a sought-after speaker, teaching both nationally and internationally. She also teaches for online venues such as Writer’s Digest, Writing Day Workshops, and Book Passage Bookstore. Elizabeth represents both literary and commercial fiction as well as nonfiction. In fiction, she represents thrillers, mysteries, literary, commercial, women’s, and historical. In nonfiction, she is interested in finding true crime, investigative journalism, narrative/creative nonfiction, prescriptive, voice- or adventure-driven memoir, high concept, science, spirituality, sexuality, self-help, and pet stories. When not working with writers or writing herself, Elizabeth can be found on the beach looking for shark teeth and sea glass or in the forest taking life advice from the redwood trees. Learn more
The Iowa Writers’ Collaborative is on a Roll
First, if you are a paid subscriber to any one of the members of the IWC, you are invited to attend a gathering in Winterset on July 26 to watch the film Storm Lake. Wini Moranville sums up the deets:
Whether people admit to contemplating the question you posed, they silently do. I’m reminded of the story of an aged man who is planting a tree being asked why, when he’ll never live long enough to enjoy its fruit. He responds that he does things like he’ll live forever. The one asking realizes he lives life like he only has days left. Personally, I prefer the former rather to the latter. I didn’t always feel that way.
In a line from a favorite play and movie I love “Harvey”, Elwood P. Dowd (friend of a 6 foot tall rabbit by that name) shares his grandmother ‘s insight about how a person can face life’s challenges with either smarts or a good attitude, and he chooses the latter. I agree with Mr. Dowd and his friend Harvey.
A hard question - but clearly an important, and potentially life-changing, one. Great catch-up and way to start my morning.