Mishpacha (משפחה) means "family" but is also used to describe extended family, friends, community, or that gregarious old botanist and Vietnam vet you met in a parking lot on the San Juan Islands while waiting for a delayed ferry and as you chewed the fat he mentioned a tiny off-grid island only reachable by small boat so the next day you packed your tent and essentials and hitched a ride on his skiff to the tiny island where you camped near a family's yurt for two weeks under swaying Douglas-fir trees and hooting Great Horned Owls and a few days later you rode a borrowed bike through the woods past a herd of grazing billy goats to the other side of the island where you might pick up a couple bars of Verizon signal from a Canadian cell tower and on the way you encountered an old man astride a stretched bicycle wearing a red fisherman's cap like a character in a Dr. Seuss book and he shared through a mussy white beard that he'd been living on this island for over thirty years and insisted, no insisted, on giving you his copy of 'The Journalist and the Murderer' by Janet Malcolm and added behind a smirk that he very much enjoyed the book's first page and upon reading it later you realized, with some shame, that it was not meant to be a flattering commentary on your interloping tradecraft but eventually you mailed the book back to him which was possible because the island had a solitary post office tucked into a hundred-year old log cabin, and it turns out that same man had been a mail carrier for 25 years ferrying letters and packages by boat from nearby islands to this very cabin, and still to this day you speak on the phone every now and then to the other old man, the one you met in the parking lot who approached you with jolly curiosity instead of wary suspicion and showed you the secretive island, a place locals asked you not to name and refer to only as an "island somewhere in the Salish Sea".