We’re selling our Sunfish sailboat, which signals the end of an era. Maybe we’re not really sailors after all is what this sale might signify.

We bought the boat 20 years ago because I’d grown up with a Sun Flower sailboat here at the lake, and I thought it would be a great idea to relive those years as an adult. And I wanted to get the whole family sailing. I had this great vision of us all whizzing across the ocean around Cape Cod, where we lived at the time with our hair blowing behind us, in a series of long, salty summer days.

That boat never made it near the ocean, thank god, because I might not be here now to sell it.

But the Sunfish did make it to a pond near our house, which was more our style and skill set. And I remembered enough about sailing to go on several spins and impress my husband enough that he’d actually get back on the boat the next time.

The problem was my dad had taught me to sail and he barely knew the difference between a rudder and a daggerboard. Our instruction was to use our intuition and feel the wind. And after sailing enough, tipping over enough and getting hit in the head with the boom enough, I could sail pretty well.

But it wasn’t proper instruction and I lacked a sailing vocabulary. You’d never hear me say, for instance, “Two points abaft the port beam!”

I’m sorry my father is no longer available for lessons because teachers like him don’t exist anymore. What parent throws their kid a substandard life preserver and directs her to go teach herself to sail? “Go feel the wind,” he’d say, and “have a ball!”

Despite our lack of acumen, we loved our childhood boat on Chautauqua Lake. My dad was such a good sailor, he could read a book while sailing in that little craft.

Once, while sailing on a July afternoon in the 1970s, a wind funnel came down the lake, and we watched as it picked my dad and the boat in the air at least 20 feet and deposited both of them into the churning water upside down.

And I kid you not when my aunt stood there looking out at the scene and said, “Well, there goes our summer.”

Two family friends rushed to the neighbor’s house to launch his row boat to rescue my father, but like right out of a cartoon, they were rowing as hard as they could and getting nowhere. The water was as rough as we’d ever seen it and a dramatic lake rescue wasn’t in the cards.

It was entirely possible that my father could drown and we stood on the front lawn peering out at the lake as our picnic lunch took flight, napkins and paper plates sailing through the air like seagulls. But it wasn’t long before we saw his head bobbing in the water and his hands grasping two orange life preservers.

He made his way to shore like a hero, and eventually, we’d fetch the important parts of the boat from in front of various houses in our neighborhood.

We were made whole.

We had our father and our little boat.

When I bought my own Sunfish, I had a similar disaster with my own husband: The sky grew dark, the winds picked up and before I knew it, we were in the water.

And the strangest thing happened.

My husband literally went into a trance. I was trying to tell him how to handle our predicament and I could tell he was not really hearing me. He was staring straight ahead with a glazed look in his eyes.

“You are holding the rigging to the sail,” I said to him. “If you drop it, we will no longer have a sail. So carefully pass the rigging to me and then come hold the hull of the boat.”

He dropped the sail and it slowly made its way to the bottom of the pond.

A homeowner had been watching from his window and came out in a little fishing boat to rescue us.

I realized then that a boating accident when my husband was a teen had rendered him afraid of the water, and although he’d tried to be a good sport and embrace our sailboat, that kind of fear is hard to overcome.

My daughter would go on to take proper sailing lessons and successfully sail that boat many times-once we bought a brand new sail. But she is grown now and recently married and hasn’t thought of the boat in years.

So, that little Sunfish has been sitting in our garage for a few years now, looking sort of lost and lonely. He needs a family-one with a dad who might yell, “Go feel the wind!”

And I feel a little sad to be honest. I spend a lot of time now putting eras to bed. And holding onto the memories attached to them so they don’t drift to the bottom of the pond.