Closing Time

You thought we’d closed the sailing chapter of our lives back in April when we sold Free Range, right?

Wrong.

As part of our arrangement with Free Range’s new owners, we are responsible for removing Free Range from the US Registry of Boats. See, her new owners are Canadian and in order to register Free Range as a Canadian boat, she must first be un-registered as an American boat – no dual citizenship allowed in the boating world.

After several months and many frustrating exchanges with the U.S. Coast Guard, we have finally obtained the Letter of Deletion – an official document stating that Free Range is no longer a U.S. boat – she can now sail under the Canadian flag.

And so this morning, as I slip a copy of the Letter of Deletion into the worn manilla envelope filled to bursting with paper artifacts from our nine months at sea, I feel a little sad. This is the last piece of paper that will ever be filed in our “Free Range” envelope; it is the final page in the short yet dense chapter of our sailing lives. But it also symbolizes the beginning of something new – the next great adventure.

This Nineties band, Semisonic, came out with a song the year I graduated high school. I always loved it because of its poeticism: it looks both back, sentimentally, and forward, excitedly. It’s how this Letter makes me feel:

they sing,

Closing Time, every new beginning comes from some other beginning’s end.