Teresa Mull

I hated going to school so much as a kid that to this day, the sight of Back to School! signs printed in cutesy kiddy font on glowing school-bus yellow that fill stores every August strikes me with dread. I want to punch them. My elementary school years were fine; I attended a teeny-tiny Catholic school where I think most of the dedicated teachers qualified for food stamps. I knew my classmates so well that they were essentially extended siblings (and a couple of them still are). I graduated first in my class (out of ten) and was star of the pathetic basketball team. High school was a Catholic school too, but insular and snooty. I was an outsider there, from “over the mountain.” I wasn’t bullied or anything, but no matter what, I always felt like I was imprisoned.

When I asked Malinda and Keith Martin when a good time for an interview would be, Malinda wrote back, “We are having drinks on the back deck, so now would be fine.” I was having drinks on my front porch, and I knew already the conversation would be more than fine. The Martins are from Huntsville, Alabama, and started down the Tennessee River in their 1987 forty-three-foot Hatteras motor yacht — the Sea Cottage — last December on their quest to become “Loopers.” In late May, when we spoke, they were anchored in North Carolina. A person earns the title of “Looper” when he completes the Great Loop, which America’s Great Loop Cruisers’ Association (AGLCA) explains is “a circumnavigation of the eastern US and part of Canada.

February is the worst month and everybody knows it. The awkward number of days, the wretched weather. Even the way it’s spelled is irritating. Yet just when you think your raging Seasonal Affective Disorder will get the best of you, February, of all months, offers a break in the bleakness that’s been indomitable since New Year’s. It’s absurd, hokey and best of all, like the Pennsylvania Dutch who invented it, immune to politics. Which is why Groundhog Day should be a national holiday instead of just a regional one. Groundhog Day seemed like a big deal when I was a kid.

The table at which I sit to write this column is more than 400 years old — and yet brand new. A few years ago, when a mammoth oak fell in my parents’ woods, we profited from the generosity of friends with chainsaws and access to a lumber mill and kiln who were just as determined as we were not to see this venerable specimen go to waste. My parents consulted with yet another party keenly concerned with preservation — a local, family-owned, custom furniture builder of “heirloom-quality.” It seems like a quaint concept, in this fast-forward world, where news stories and trends mirror the lifespan of an avocado — ripe one second and useless the next — to acquire and keep things with a mind for future generations.