Mishpacha (משפחה) means "family" and is also used to describe extended family, friends, community, or that gregarious old botanist and Vietnam vet you once met in a parking lot on the San Juan Islands while waiting for a delayed ferry and as you killed time chatting the man offered to take you to a tiny neighboring island that he said was completely off-grid and reachable only by small boat so the next day you packed your things and hopped onto a small boat and then camped outside a family's yurt for two weeks where Great Horned Owls would hoot above your tent in the forest canopy every night and some days later you rode a borrowed bike through the woods past a herd of billy goats to the other side of the island and along the path encountered an old man with a white beard in a fisherman's cap riding a stretched lowrider bicycle who said he'd been living on the island for over thirty years and he insisted on giving you his copy of 'The Journalist and the Murderer' by Janet Malcolm and said with a barely contained smirk that he 'especially enjoyed' the book's first page and upon reading it later you realized, with some shame, that it was not meant as a flattering commentary on the nature of your interloping vocation but you eventually got around to returning the book to him some months later which was possible because the island had a solitary post office tucked into an old wooden log cabin that serviced the island's population of fifty or so year round residents, and still to this day you speak on the phone every once in awhile to the other old man, the one who approached you with jolly curiosity instead of wary suspicion and first brought you to the island, a place locals asked you not to name and refer to only as an "island somewhere in the Salish Sea".