Boots and Blessings

There are no baby pictures of me. Not that I wasn’t loved; I was. But my Dad took only slides, which are not made for easily passing around. When he and Mama retired and began traveling, the slides and most of their worldly goods were carefully put into climate-controlled storage. Climate-controlled doesn’t mean flood proof. Which hurricane was that, I ask Mom. Rosa? We can’t remember. Water has always been a part of my life. Dad was a fisherman, so every vacation, we were somewhere with water. The Texas coast, Florida, Colorado mountain lakes, creeks in Canadian campgrounds. Weekends on East Texas lakes. In some primal way, it feels like water was my first language. In those long-gone pictures, there were slides of me as an infant, covered with an umbrella on a beach on the Gulf of Mexico. Growing up on the coast, hurricanes have always been part of my life, too. Little details still swim around my brain. The tape residue that never could be completely removed from criss