Jacob Have I Loved As soon as the snow melts, I will go to Bass and fetch my mother. At Crisfield I'll board the ferry, climbing down into the cabin where the women always ride, but after forty minutes of sitting on the hard cabin bench, I'll stand up to peer out of the high forward windows, straining for the first sight of my island. The ferry will be almost there before I can see Rass, lying low as -a terrapin back on the faded olive water of the Chesapeake. Suddenly, though, the steeple of the Methodist Church will leap from the Bay, dragging up a cluster of white board houses. And then, almost at once, we will be in the harbour, tying up beside Captain Billy's unpainted two- storey ferry house, which leans wearily against a long, low shed used for the captain's crab shipping business. Next door, but standing primly aloof in a coat of fierce green paint, is Kellam's General Store with the post once inside, and behind them, on a narrow spine of fast land, the houses and white picket fences of the village. There are only a few spindly trees. It is the excess of snowball bushes that lends a semblance of green to every yard. The dock onto which I'll step is part of a maze of docks. My eye could travel down the planking of any one of them and find at the end a shack erected by a waterman for storage and crab packing. If I arrive in late spring, the crab houses will be surrounded by slat floats that hold and protect peeler crabs in the water of the Bay until they have shed. Then the newly soft crabs will be packed in eelgrass and the boxes taken to Captain Billy's for shipping to the mainland.