Page 74 of Homecoming

As Kara smiled at her grandmother, Dan enjoyed the glow in his wife’s eyes at doing one of her favorite things with two of her favorite people. “Everyone has their own color palette for their buoys. Ours are orange with two white stripes. If you see an orange one with three white stripes, that’s not ours.”

“They’re also marked with an official government tag that identifies them as ours,” Bertha added, “and we repaint them every winter.”

“You don’t fish in the winter?”

“Not anymore. I used to go out a couple days a week, but lately, I’d rather stay home and paint buoys and repair the traps.”

“That’s still a lot of work.”

“It’s easy, and we can do it inside where it’s warm.”

“She likes to supervise me from her recliner,” Buster said, making them laugh.

“She gets a lot done from that chair,” Kara said.

“And how,” Buster replied.

“It’s my command post,” Bertha said.

“Anyway,” Kara said, “the term Downeast comes from direction versus an actual location. Back in the day, when people would sail from Boston to Maine, they’d sail downwind to get to the east coast of Maine, which is where the Downeast name came from.”

“So is all of the eastern coast of Maine considered Downeast?”

“Depends on who you ask,” Bertha said. “It includes all of Washington and Hancock Counties and scores of fishing villages. Everyone has a different definition of what counts as Downeast.”

“How many lobster fisher-people are there in this area?”

“What’s the latest number from the DELA, Buster?” Bertha asked.

“Around three thousand are Downeast, but more than four thousand statewide.”

“What’s the DELA?”

“Downeast Lobstermen’s Association,” Bertha said.

“Um, that’s not gender neutral,” Dan said.

“Believe me, I’ve raised that point with them repeatedly over the years. A lot of us are women these days.”

“What’s the best time of year for lobstering?” Dan asked.

“Right about now,” Bertha said.

Buster went down below and came back a few minutes later wearing gear with a Grundéns label on it.

As they got farther out from the harbor, the seas became choppier, and a queasy feeling set into Dan’s gut. He glanced at Kara, seated across from Bertha, and saw that she was handling the movement of the sea better than he was. Of course she was. She’d been born into this.

When Bertha brought the boat alongside one of her distinctive buoys, Buster got to work on the hydraulic lift that brought the trap to the surface.

Bertha left the helm to head to the stern to assist Buster in retrieving the lobsters, measuring them, returning a few to the water and putting bands on the claws of the ones they were keeping.

They were like a well-oiled machine, going about their task without a single word passing between them.

“How do they decide which ones go back?” Dan asked.

“If they’re pregnant females or undersize—or even oversized.”

“They can be too big?”

---