My cousin Grace has always made perfect sense to me: from the porch on Aaron Avenue I saw her step across the lawn and carry her small sailboat, its keel a light salt-stained yellow, down the stone ramp and onto the shore where I could still see her as she hoisted the mainsail and tightened the halyard line. In the ten o’clock sun her work was perennial—
she was there in early summer, near the short-lived flowering plants bordering the breakwater cliff, and she would depart with them in July when her sailing school began its term—
but from the (pricking light of water) which (backed) and caused the movement of her labor, my squinting hushed her image.