I sifted through the old photo album. It was torn and dusty, old brown leather folded up and curled around my fingers. Pictures of all my past travels littered the pages, each one seemed to tell it’s own story. Five whole pages chronicled my twenty-seventh birthday during my two week trip to France. The Eiffel Tower glowed in the background of a few of them.

    As I shuffled through more pages, I began to travel backwards in time. My eighth grade trip to New York, my family vacation in Canada, my fifth grade trip to Boston. Every one reminded me of all the unique experiences I had had all those years ago.

    Then, as if out of an old dream, the final picture caught my attention. It was slightly torn and faded, but you could still see every slightly rusted pot and pan, and the small white boat outside the window. This was my trip to Mystic Connecticut, where I saw my first boat. I must have been about four years old.

    I remember bouncing up and down along the cobblestones while holding my mother’s hand. The ground was a bit uneven and I tripped every so often, but she was always there to catch me. We stopped at a rustic looking wooden building. Once we stepped inside I saw all sorts of pots and pans crammed in every corner, and a short pudgy man who was showing a few of them to an elderly couple. But the thing that really caught my eye was what I saw through an old and foggy glass window.

    I saw a long dock, and through the haze of twenty-eight years I could still see it perfectly clear. A huge white boat floated beside the dock in front of me, tied in place by two or three ropes. I laughed to myself looking down at the picture. The boat looking back at me was small, but to a young girl it had seemed like the biggest thing in the world.

    My mom snapped a picture, this picture, and that was the moment I knew I wanted to be a sailor. And now, at age thirty-two, I smiled, looking up out of my window at my very own small white boat. It was almost the perfect mirror image of the craft in the photo, my favorite boat.