Pittstown Point, Crooked Island, Bahamas

I lost a very important email today. It may not seem like much, but it was a crushing blow on a rather crushing day. Nappy told us this morning he’s going back to Nassau for an unknown length of time, we’re basically done with the house, just like that. And Frenchie, our new friend from Louisiana, has offered us a ride back to Fort Pierce, Florida, on his plane on Tuesday. Now, all of a sudden, all of these essential decisions we’ve been putting off are looming, as well as all the things we’ve been putting off doing.

The list of things to be done just keeps growing, too. Karl has now acquired a reputation in town as the go-to guy for electronics, and he was called away this afternoon to inspect someone’s refrigerator, leaving a VHF in need of repair on the counter. If he can become a VHF repairman, he’ll have work in the Bahamas for life. I’m afraid his verve for labor is dwindling, though--poor little Secret has rested peacefully out here, biding her time, waiting for us to be done with all of our busy land-based activities. She needs us. We need her. We have to figure out how to all be happy together again.

So we went to our little internet pirate hotspot, about which we try to be discreet, to try to figure out if we could get home from Florida, if we could moor the boat safely in two days, if we could get in touch with friends who can drive us around or at least drop us off somewhere where we can hike home. And I lost all my draft emails. My new offline email system, about which I was so proud, completely bit the dust. One of them was one I had worked on all day yesterday. Just like that, a whole day’s labor gone. My sister loses blog entries all the time, a fate which strikes terror in my heart, so I back up everything compulsively. I had saved all my emails multiple times, too, but they just disappeared. The internet’s ways are not our ways.

So we slunk, dejected, back to the boat. I blame myself, of course. I always do. Sometimes its the little things that get to me the most--the clutter that accumulates in the corner of my life no matter how hard I try to keep it at bay, being unable to talk to my sister at the one moment when I absolutely need to, feeling like something that’s been lost can never be found again. We’ve weathered greater disasters, of course. But now, as our list of decisions to be made pile up on top of us and our time draws short, every little minute counts.