We've had the same boat since 1981

Say that again, would you. The left one whistles when it's cold and I've been meaning to get up to Ellsworth about it since Thanksgiving, and now here it is September.

I've got four cord in already, split and under cover, which is more than I need and I know it. Lisa says buy pellets. Lisa's in Bangor, she's some kind of counselor. I'm not buying pellets. Ray cut with me up till about five years ago and then his shoulder went, so now he sits on the tailgate and tells me I'm stacking it wrong.

The Pinkham boy, he's forty-two and I still call him the boy, has a dog that's been in my dooryard since the snow went. Not a bad dog. Comes right up to you with his whole back end going. But he's been at the bin, and twice now there's been chicken bones the length of the driveway, and I spoke to Pinkham about it the once and I'm not going to do it again. His mother sat with Dottie at the end. So I pick the bones up.

Anyway. The yard called week before last. She's hauled out up to Cutler and the fella there, Dean, he's Pauline's youngest, he says come here and put your thumb on that. So I put my thumb on it and it went in. Transom's punky. It's plywood in there under the glass. Thirty-eight hundred to cut the cap off and put new wood in. He's not gouging me. That's just the number. They bill for blocking either way, forty a month, in or out of the water.

We bought her in eighty-one off Delbert Beal for nine hundred dollars and a chainsaw that was worth about forty of it. Twenty foot, outboard well, she already had the name on the transom when we got her. Doris B., after his mother I suppose. We never changed it. Dottie thought that was the funniest thing that ever happened to anybody. I never laid eyes on the woman.

Ray and I go back further than the boat. We was both at the cannery in Prospect Harbor before either one of us had anything. You'd come home and your wife would put your clothes on the porch, not in the house, on the porch. Your hands smelled like it through the gloves. Ray could pack faster than anybody down there and he'd stand there doing it and telling you a story the whole time, and you couldn't hear a word over the line, and he'd get to the end and laugh and you'd laugh too. That plant shut in 2010. They said on the news it was the last sardine cannery in the country.

Bait went to twenty-two a bushel in ninety-four. Twenty-two. I went out and sat in the truck a while. That was the year everybody started talking about getting out.

I carried the mail thirty-four years, 191 up through Whiting and around. You learn who's dying before their own family does. I could still drive most of that route with my eyes shut. The rest of it is people I never met, from away, and they put up those gates. A rural carrier finds his own vehicle, so that's four trucks, and not one of them was ever right.

Ray's got a key to my truck. Has had for years. He's also got the habit of coming into my house without knocking, which Dottie could not stand, and she told him so, and he kept doing it, and she'd have the coffee on anyway. He makes it too weak. He comes in, he makes a pot, he drinks two swallows of it and pours the rest out, and I don't know why he does that. Forty-five years of it.

The thing for my ear lives in a pill bottle by the sugar and most days I don't put it in till dinnertime.

Dottie went in March of 2016. Ray stood at the back at the church and didn't come up, and then he plowed my dooryard every storm that winter and never once said he was doing it, I'd just look out and it'd be done. His Sandra left him in ninety-three and he never said much about that neither.

Karen don't call. That's the younger one.

Tuesdays we go out. He brings sandwiches his daughter-in-law makes and they're terrible, too much mayonnaise, and I eat them.

There was a night in seventy-nine. The place was out on 187, it burned in eighty-eight and there's a storage outfit there now with the orange doors.

Cold night. My heater wasn't putting out anything on account of the alternator was going, which I knew and hadn't done nothing about, and about a month after that it quit on me for good up by the Columbia Falls line and I had to walk. That's a Sears alternator. Sixty-one dollars in seventy-nine. I can tell you what near everything I ever bought cost.

We'd been in there since supper and we come out and got in the truck, mine, the one before the one I got now, and there was a payphone on the wall of the building maybe twenty feet off with a light over it, and a man on it. Had his back to us.

And we didn't drive off for a good while, and what happened in that truck I'm not going to lay out for you, but it happened.

After, he sat there a minute. Then he said my alternator was going, listen to it. And it was going. He was right about that.

He drove me home in it and we never said one word about it. Not the year he got married and I stood up with him either. I couldn't tell you if he thinks about it.

He come by yesterday about the transom. Let himself in and made a pot. Said he'd go halves and he'd call Dean himself, and I said all right.

Then he said Dean can't get to her till after Columbus Day. Said it twice, because I had the water running.

That dog had been at the bin while we was sitting in there. Bones down the end of the driveway again. One of them was up under the truck.