I’m cleaning up my computer while the wind howls through the trees and the rain lashes at my window.
I just found this photograph.
In the beginning we lived on our sailboat at a little anchorage in Brentwood Bay and saved loonies. A “loonie” is a Canadian $1 coin so called because it has a picture of a loon on the tail end. We saved up a ton of loonies because we used three loonies each to take a hot shower up at the marina ablution block and two loonies to do the laundry. This was all a novelty until the autumn started to creep in and the dew lay thick on the decks, the towels were damp and the sugar lumpy as Summer Love had no heat.
We didn’t install a heater in Cape Town as we hardly used the boat in winter and sure as nuts didn’t think we’d need heat while cruising in the Caribbean, but now I was getting cold and the trek to the showers on the slippery docks was treacherous at times. So, Robb found a one bedroomed apartment in Sidney and all we needed to start was a bed. The cruising kitty was a little malnourished so we just bought a good mattress and plopped it right down on the floor! I recycled two unsoiled apple boxes out of the CARDBOARD ONLY dumpster and with a placemat on top they became the perfect little bedside tables.
We felt like students again, but it was good.
We had a bathtub with gallons of hot water that didn’t use loonies. We had a washer and drier that didn’t use loonies. We had heat, loads of heat that didn’t use loonies and a bed, a bed that didn’t move.
