AT H O ME
Red Atlantic BY DOMINIQUE SINAGRA ILLUSTRATED BY CECILE GENEVIER
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o one in my family was meant to be born. My father had been married before he met my mother to a woman named Sandy. We saw her on occasion standing on the curb in front of East Gloucester Variety Store smoking cigarettes. “Hey Sandy, how ya doin’?” “Hi Joey, How’s it goin’?” Sandy and my father tried to have children but couldn’t. My father had all the appropriate tests and was deemed infertile by doctors. My mother hadn’t been in Gloucester long when she met my father. She went there one day for no reason at all, just one day she decided to go for a drive. She drove north from Boston on Route 128 in her blue Jetta her father bought her. Route 128 stretches all the way from Florida, up the East Coast of the United States, until finally finishing in Gloucester. Gloucester is at the tip of Cape Ann and juts into the Atlantic Ocean. Cape Ann is the point just above Cape Cod. It has been home to fishing families since the 1600’s and boasts being America’s oldest Seaport. My mother drove over the Annisquam River; a salt water river that is more a canal than a river that cuts Gloucester off from the mainland, creating a man-made island. “What is this place?” my mother thought as she drove east through the city passing the boats bobbing in the harbor like head nodding in agreement. A few weeks later she moved into a cinderblock building on Rocky Neck over looking the railways,
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