The cooler had never been plastic. It had been the part of the plan we carried forward. The proof that families sometimes need impractical dreams not because they intend to fulfill them, but because planning them together becomes its own destination.

I have owned better things since then. Real things. Expensive things. Things with warranties and monthly payments and instruction manuals. But I remember none of them as clearly as that impossible boat, that rainy Saturday, those sinking newspaper vessels, and my father standing barefoot in the kitchen, declaring that a family with no boat could still have a boating day.

He was right.

We never bought a boat.

But somehow, we never lost the cooler.

The End.