If I’m being honest, I’d have to say that for all the years Meg and I were together, I took Flower for granted. I wasn’t the one choosing it, paying for it, paying for repairs, or repairing it. Meg did all of that. All I had to do was accept the opportunity. The reality is that Meg and Flower gave me a life I could never have gotten anywhere else or from anybody else. I see Flower as a natural extension of Meg — of her rebellious nature. And to truly know how I feel about our boat, I should imagine losing it. Would it hurt? Would I think twice? Would the sudden reality of losing it scare me?
The answer is yes to all three. Flower has become part of who I am. Living on it, surviving with it, essentially made me. And I am grateful. The boat has sustained me and Meg for twenty years, and it is the only world we know.
Is Flower a survivor? Unquestionably. Meg calls it “what we put it through.” But I don’t think we did it — it was all about survival. And Flower made our survival possible. We’ve been through various kinds of hell out there, far offshore. We’ve been through gales, storms, hurricanes, days of dead calm, freezing in Victoria and Nova Scotia. We dragged Flower in and out of the tropics several times. We ripped sails, stressed standing rigging, tore and mangled running rigging, ran aground many times. Yet Flower is still in one piece. And I have a feeling it will always be in one piece. The boat seems indestructible.
What do I want for Flower, for me, and for Meg? Can the two of us part with our boat? Will we? Honestly, I don’t know. Nothing about my and Meg’s life has ever been clear. And today we, too, have no idea what tomorrow will bring.
This photo of Flower is special to me. Meg and I were returning to our boat after spending some time on one of the tiny islands in the Bahamas in 2018. It was around then that I began to understand what true loneliness feels like. Seeing Flower against the sunset at that moment, I realised that this boat was our shelter, our vessel, our world, and our safety. It was literally our only way of surviving and going on.