Raising 4 Houseboat Boys

My kids never had a grass backyard. What they had was the bay — and honestly, I think they got the better end of that deal.

Growing up on the floating homes means growing up close to something real. The seasons don't change through a window; you feel them. The water is cold in January and alive in July.

The stripers run in the fall. You learn these things not because someone tells you, but because you're out there with a rod in your hand before school, or hanging off the dock rail watching a seal work the shallows. Nature isn't a field trip. It's just Tuesday.

Fishing was a constant. The kids knew how to bait a hook before they knew how to ride a bike. Saturday mornings meant lines in the water and whatever the bay decided to offer up. Some days that was a lot, some days nothing — and that's its own kind of education. You learn patience. You learn that the water doesn't owe you anything, and you love it anyway.

Then there's the community, which is unlike anything I've seen in a traditional neighborhood. On the floating homes, you don't slip into your house from a garage and disappear for a week. To get anywhere, you walk the dock — and the dock is shared. Every morning, every evening, you see your neighbors. You know their names, their dogs, their moods. The kids grew up talking to adults the way adults talk to each other, because there was no avoiding it. Mr. So-and-So two slips down always had something to say, and my kids learned to hold a conversation and mean it.

That kind of community raised them alongside us. There were always eyes on the dock, always someone to pull a kid back from the edge — literally and otherwise. The neighbors weren't just people who happened to live nearby. They were part of the fabric of daily life in a way that's hard to replicate on a cul-de-sac.

Sure, there's no lawn to mow and no swing set. But my kids can read the tide, name the birds that work the bay at dusk, and look a stranger in the eye and shake their hand. They grew up wild in the best sense of the word — close to nature, rooted in community, and completely at home on the water.

There's nowhere I would have rather raised them.