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My mother was a woman who was still beautiful when I came along, but who had also been a girl of extraordinary beauty when she was growing up. She had been instilled with the notions of traditional feminine behavior and had longed to be a cheerleader and a prom queen when she was growing up. She had the misfortune of being a Metis in a town that was created by predominantly Norwegian and Germanic settlers, and as an Indian 'breed she was treated as an outcast. This grated upon her senses heavily because she wanted to be popular. My mother always wore carefully applied makeup and read fashion magazines to keep up with the latest styles in clothing. She was graceful and charming in public, and somehow she managed to produce me. I was a quasi tomboy when I was growing up. I rode horses, climbed apple trees and beat up boys when I wasn't playing softball with them. I played with dolls and board games when I was with other girls. I had no sense of what was feminine or masculine, I simply was me and my gender happened to be female. To my mother's horror I had no social graces, no sense of fashion, and worst of all, I didn't care if I ever did. When I was growing up I was berated for not having lots of friends and lacking the interest my mother had in becoming a cheerleader. I thought football was stupid and had no interest in dating the captain of any team. In my mother's eyes I was an abomination. As I grew older and went out on my own, the question always arose with every call home-- did I have a boyfriend? The next question was always, did I think I was ever going to settle down and get married? My mother acted like there was something wrong with me. She couldn't seem to get it through her head that times had changed. There was room in the world for women like me. I could travel and have adventures, or I could have a career in some field and dedicate my life to it. Women no longer had to tie their destinies to men unless they wanted to. Sometimes I think the spirits have a peculiar sense of family counseling. I went to work on the F/V Provider, which is a scallop boat. During one of our trips we hauled up a body. I had just finished cleaning up after lunch and was getting ready to come out and work on deck when one of the guys came running in wide-eyed and looking scared to tell me the news. I was immediately curious as to who our corpse might be? When I came out on deck the body was still laying on top of the scallops on the port side where it had been dumped out of the dredge. I pinched my nostrils closed in case the thing smelled bad and went over to examine it. The first thing I noticed was that the head was missing from the hood of the Helly Hanson deck suit the person had been wearing. "He has no head!" I told the skipper, who was watching from the pilot house window. "His head is gone!" I looked the body over, trying to determine what fishery the man had come from. Helly Hanson deck suits are usually worn by crabbers, though I had seen some draggers wear them as well. This guy was wearing a nylon belt with a Victory Knox deck knife still in its sheath. Rubberbands still held the pants legs tightly closed around the X-tra Tuff deck boots. He was still wearing the heavy orange gloves that were worn on deck in cold weather. His general attire indicated to me that he was probably a crabber. Draggers don't usually have to worry about water washing up on deck so they rarely wear the rubberbands around their ankles. The suit looked full and bloated, but because no flesh was hanging out at the neck I figured it was full of sand fleas, which are ravenous, efficient, shrimp-like scavengers that travel and feed in schools. "He's a crabber!" I shouted to the captain, "I'll bet he's the guy they lost off of the Alaskan Trader last November during Bairdi season!" I had been on the Fierce Allegiance during that storm. We lost the windows out of the starboard side of the pilot house while traveling back to Dutch Harbor because of a fifty foot wave. Earlier in the day the Alaskan Trader had lost a man overboard from off their stack of crab pots where he had been trying to secure them with chains so that they wouldn't shift and turn the boat over. The Alaskan Trader had been unable to recover her lost crew man. Fishing was canceled on the Provider for the rest of the day. I helped clear the scallops from the starboard side and then went back inside. As I peeled away my rain gear I felt as though horns began to sprout from my forehead as an idea began to hatch. Outside, the crew who manned the port side had to bag the body and clear away the scallops we had brought up with the body in the port dredge. While they were doing this they found the skull, which had popped out of the Helly Hanson suit when the dredge was hauled up. We were not allowed to keep those particular shellfish because of health codes, and the skipper was afraid we might have to forfeit our entire cargo because of the body for the same reason. The deck was scoured with bleach and all precautions were taken to avoid any hint of contamination of our product to avoid losing our catch. As I headed for the galley I felt as though a pointed tail sprouted from my backside and my feet had turned to cloven hooves. There was an opportunity in this situation that appealed to my sense of the ironic as I thought of all the harassment I had endured from my mother because of my perennial single status. In the galley I fixed myself a cup of coffee and began to compose a letter to Mother in my head:
Please remember to sign my Guestbook 
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