Forget-Me-Knot 2

My father is a sailor. Or at least, he was. My whole life, I’d heard tales of how he spent his summers as a kid taking Picos and little Hobie catamarans up and down the shore of Lake Ontario around Prince Edward County, where he had grown up.

I always found these tales immensely comforting. The idea of my solid, reliable, steady-as-the-earth father having maritime adventures made me feel like maybe I could be a daring lakefarer too.

But he never taught me to sail. There’s a cottage that’s been in my dad’s family for generations, a little no-AC, one-bathroom, well-water affair on a lesser-known lake in Eastern Ontario. Growing up, my sister and I spent endless summer days splashing around there in the blackish-green lakewater, always careful to wear our water shoes to avoid the wrath of zebra mussels. There was a windsurf board with no sail attached, a couple of well-used kayaks, and a beloved inflatable dolphin, but the only sailboat the cottage had ever seen had been disposed of long before my sister or I ever arrived. Beyond the cottage, growing up in the Greater Toronto Area gave me little opportunity to learn to sail - the multi-hour commute to get to the near-toxic waterfront nipped my lakefaring adventures in the bud, for the most part, and my parent’s long working hours hammered in the last nail.

I never resented my dad for not teaching us to sail. In fact, it took most of my life until I realized how much sailing had meant to him, so it never occurred to me to think it strange that he had never suggested that we sail together. It wasn’t until my grandparents passed away, two years after I graduated from university, and my dad spoke at their service that I realized what kind of family inheritance had skipped over me.

Sitting in my cheap black dress, shifting uncomfortably on hard pews, my dad spoke of a sailing trip that his father had taken the family on when my dad was my age. My grandpa had wrangled the kids, by then all in their twenties, and had escorted them down to Aruba for a two-week sojourn on the sea.

The funeral home had a projector and a screen. As he spoke, my dad flipped through photos of the trip. I watched the carousel of memories with bittersweet fascination, nostalgic for something I had never experienced. My father, before starting grad school, his colouring the exact same as mine, smiling back at me from the eighties. My grandfather, in his silver-fox prime, my beautiful grandmother by his side. A picture of the sailboat, taken from a sunny dock, the name painted in cherry-red on its bow: Forget-Me-Knot. I let out a small laugh at the corny name. My dad has a great sense of humor, and he inherited it and the lightness with which he approaches everything from my Grandma and Grandpa.

Tears slipped down my face as my dad recounted the long days of hauling rope for my grandfather, who shouted commands from the helm. As he reminisced about the time he had slipped off the stern, plunging into the salty, pool-blue waters of the warm Caribbean sea, I tasted saltwater, too.

We were driving around town the next day, waiting to check out of the quiet motel where my family was staying for the funeral, when I asked my dad about the sailing trip. About the Forget-Me-Knot.

“It was a great trip,” he said with a smile. His eyes were still red.

“I never knew you did big trips like that with Grandpa,” I prodded.

He nodded.

“Yeah, Grandpa was a big sailor. He was the one who taught me. He was also the one making me enter regattas, getting me up at five in the morning to go race other kids for little trophies. He acted like it was the Olympics.”

He chuckled at this last sarcastically.

“Regattas?” I asked. I had always thought my dad just sailed for fun.

“Yeah, yeah. I entered a few of the big races down here. It was fun for a bit, but, you know. When you start doing something competitively it takes away some of the joy. Especially when you’re waking up before dawn to do it.”

I looked at him. In his stony-blue eyes, the same shade as the ones in my own skull, I thought I could see the ocean. I had never known my Grandpa was a sailor.

We didn’t talk about it again after that. I don’t know why, but once we got home from the service, I looked into booking sailing lessons. They were prohibitively expensive, and I dropped it.

That is, until the next summer. When the winter gave up its jealous hold on the Earth, and the last mounds of snow ran melted away in rivulets, my mom and step dad bought a new cottage.

It was strange, going up for the first time once they had closed on the purchase. After growing up at one cottage, knowing one lake so intimately, exploring a new shoreline felt like rewriting family history. This new cottage is much closer to home than my dad’s cottage, much more convenient to get to from the city.

This realization brought some anxiety. When I think of my dad, I think of summers spent on the lake at his cottage, the cottage he inherited from his father, who had taught him to sail. The two entities - dad, cottage - are braided together like the weave of rigging. Choosing a new cottage, leaving behind the old one, felt like betraying the hundreds of hours my dad and I had spent together fishing, and building campfires, and swimming to the island across the lake and back. And I knew, given its proximity, I was likely to spend more time at the new cottage than the old. I don’t live with my dad anymore, and time at the cottage is one of the few sacred things we still share.

I was mulling all this over when I walked into the boathouse at the new cottage during my first tour of the property. I tried not to think about how many dock spiders would fill this place in the warmth of summer, and instead took stock of what the new cottage offered. A dusty canoe lay leaned against the far wall, one thwart broken off at one end and hanging in the canoe’s belly. An old tarp lay thrown over some lawn games and cans of paint in a corner. Overhead, mismatched ropes and old water skis lay jumbled in the rafters like they had been tossed up there in a hurry. As I scanned the boathouse, my eyes landed on a familiar shape.

A little Pico. My heart thrummed. It was disassembled, its sail lying rolled up next to it. Stepping closer, I could see it would require some TLC, and more importantly I had no idea how to rig or sail a boat by myself. But I knew just who to ask.

I took out my phone and texted my dad a picture of the small sailboat.

Old pico at mom's new cottage. Could you teach me how to clean/set up/sail this thing via text? Thinking I’ll name it Forget-Me-Knot 2.

I stepped out of the boathouse to stand by the shore while I waited for a response. I looked down. Staring at the rocks just below the waterline, I noticed the familiar shape of zebra mussels clinging to the olive-green rocks of the lakebed. My phone dinged.

I could teach you how to sail that thing in my sleep, he replied. In person, via text, via carrier pigeon or morse code.

I smiled, mentally tabulating how much it could possibly cost to repair a one-person dinghy. As I calculated, my phone dinged again.

Grandpa would be proud.

I gazed out across the lake. It was cold and grey now, in the Canadian April gloom, but come summer, this would be a beautiful place to sail. Unbidden and unexpected, I felt a prickle behind my eyelids, and tasted saltwater.