And so it begins.

One day back in 2010 or so, my wife Pamela was in her rather too well air-conditioned office in our hometown of Ithaca, staring with longing through the window at the rare sunshine and relative warmth of an Upstate New York summer.

And she decided then and there that she had had enough of anything and everything that can possibly be conveyed by the word indoors, and she came home that evening and let me in on something that had apparently been on her mind for a long time.

“I want to go cruising.”

“Okay.” Pause. “One question. What, for the purpose of this discussion, is cruising?”

Apparently, not this.

“Cruising is what we’ll be doing when we’ve sold the house and bought a sailboat, and are sailing her to places I would rather not drive or fly to.”

“Oh, okay.” Pause. “Another question. Don’t we have, uh, jobs?”

“Yes, we do. But we’ll leave them. And we’ll start a business we can run from the boat. And until it’s up and running, we can live off the extra proceeds from the house sale.”

“I see.” Pause. “Just one more, for clarity’s sake: Do you know how to sail?”

“No. Do you know how to sail?”

“No.”

A long pause, during which I contemplated this fact: In our household, the traditional and time-honored role of The Keeper of Good Sense had, until now, been held almost exclusively by my wife.

Finally:

“Well, then, I guess we had better learn how to sail.”

“So it would seem.”

________

That conversation was five years ago.

Tomorrow, subject to the successful completion of various maneuvers to collect seven signatures, transmit two documents, and drain our bank account of considerably more than half its value, we are stepping aboard our new home on the water. One that moves. And floats. And will stay floating. Hopefully.

So please stay tuned. This, it would seem, is just the beginning.

________

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