I once dated someone who said he’d grown up with a silver spoon in his mouth. I told him I’d grown up with a plastic spoon in mine. My parents were hippies who moved to Maine during the back-to-the-earth movement in the 1970s. They met when my father picked up my mother hitchhiking outside the farmhouse commune where she lived, a place full of drifters, some sleeping in closets. They were casually dating when my mother accidentally got pregnant with me at 23.
My father did whatever he could with his hands to make a living, which on an island off the coast of Maine meant fishing. My childhood is filled with memories of him scalloping and groundfishing, gone for days at a time, then returning with a fresh catch and oddities dredged from the deep: giant snails the size of baseballs, bottles encrusted with barnacles, and rusty turnbuckles. He’d walk through the door, six feet tall in layers of foul-weather gear, wool and flannel, his unkempt black hair and scruffy beard partially obscuring his face. He’d kneel on the floor, and I’d throw my arms around his neck, burying my face in the scratchy knit of his sweater and the stiff canvas of his lined Carhartt jacket. Smelling of sweat and fish, he always came home stinky.
