I promised you last time that I’d blog about sailing and not writing. Well, this one is about neither. It’s about something awesome that happened to me a few days ago.

My D.I.Y. book tour has taken me basically anywhere I can crash with a friend and find a place that will let me read. This past week found me taking a day off from my real job so I could drive down to South Florida and read at Broward College. My friend Laura, a poet and professor, had set up the reading for me as part of the college’s Women’s History Month series of events. She even let me stay in her guest room and eat her food.

Readings in the middle of the day at colleges are notoriously sparse. At five-after-when-it-was-supposed to start, I had audience of two. Laura toured the building and found me a few more victims as I chatted with the two. One was there as part of her creative writing class. The other, a pretty brunette in glasses, introduced herself and said, “I had to come to this because I grew up on a boat.”

“Where?” I asked.

“Miami.”

“Where in Miami?” I had a sense that something remarkable was about to happen, and she confirmed it with her answer.

“Maule Lake Marina.”

That’s when the connecting-the-dots began. She was the daughter of the dockmaster who’d been in charge when I lived there. She’d moved off of her parents’ boat shortly before I moved to the marina aboard my own boat. We’d stayed in the same slip for a little while. The boat she grew up aboard had been lost in Wilma. I knew the boat, and remembered it tangled in the mangroves after the storm—same storm that killed one of my neighbors and nearly killed me when I was washed off of A-Dock and into the murky water. I learned that the dockmaster, her mother, had passed away, and I remembered how suspicious her mother had been of me when I first came to Maule Lake. Everyone there had wondered what a 22-year-old woman was doing with her own sailboat. They had wondered about my schedule of night classes at FIU. They’d wondered if I was even really a student. Her mother had chuckled under her breath whenever I entered the marina office to get my mail. I didn’t realize at the time that the chuckle was one of appreciation. I was different. I’d chosen not to live a normal life, which was the same decision everyone at that marina had reached at one point in their lives.

Those of you who know me and those of you who lived there understand how much Maule Lake Marina means to me. It’s not there anymore. It fell victim to the overzealous developer that trashed a lot of other marinas in Florida during the boom. The condos were never built and the marina is still as vacant as it was the day the developers kicked us all out.

I have so much to ask this girl. Like what it was like to be there for her entire childhood. What it was like as a girl, turning into a teenager, to walk past the tiki bar at Tuna’s every time she wanted to take a shower. What it was like to watch people come and go. How much she felt the impact of the marina’s significant role in Miami’s drug-smuggling days. Who she remembers that I remember too—the weird family of misfits that I called my own for some of the most formative and best years of my life. Her mom is in the second chapter of the book I am writing now—my follow-up to Boat Girl. I haven’t spent nearly as much time working on it as I would like, but meeting this girl has inspired me to get back to it. A book is something that you write because of love, and I owe it to Maule Lake to get this next book written.

During my reading at the college, I chose the chapter of Boat Girl that describes the beginning of my stay there, and how one weird boxfish, pecking and scraping on the hull of my boat in the middle of the night, brought me to a state of harmony with my surroundings. This girl sat in the back of the room and cried in the stoic way that not everyone can, missing her mother.

Two days after we met, she took her daughter out kayaking in Maule Lake and posted photos on Facebook. They looked like the photos that I have of the marina now—desolate and lonely, the pilings in stark contrast to the lush mangroves. Seeing the photos was like looking through my own eyes.