The little boat that built a story

December 2^nd marks two-months since my sailboat was pulled off the lake for the winter. It seems like a lifetime ago that I was on the water with that little blue-hulled beauty, yet memories of sailing her across the bay to meet up with friends at a favorite anchorage on a sunny warm afternoon were recorded September 27^th in my diary.

I wonder if “Scout” misses me, landlocked in the backyard under layers of blue tarps and a skiff of snow, frozen where she sits.

She’d helped build a bolder “me” this past summer.

I learned to trust and lean in and let go.

She’d helped build me brave, nimble-footed, and into a sequential thinker.

I learned about challenge and what inexperience means when in a storm and unprepared.

I also had learned that paying attention to the lake map is important, because when I didn’t—and when my first mate didn’t either—even a little “Scout” boat like mine could run aground out on the lake on rocks on an otherwise quiet and uneventful evening.

During at the Rendezvous Yacht Club’s annual “Commodore’s Presentation” held recently, we celebrated the outgoing sailing season and the boat captains who made names for themselves by being really, really good sailors and winning races.

We also highlighted the blooper in the bunch.

Just as I was ramping up a loud guffaw for the name of whichever fellow sailor would be tagged as the annual rock tumbler, I was called to the front of the room to accept the “Rock Award” for 2015.

Drats! Obviously my cloaking device out on the lake didn’t work.

The jolly roving tar that had come to my rescue on that rocky day also had a camera around his neck to document the whole incident.

But it was good for a laugh.

Who knows where the lake will take me next summer, but two things are goals—away from storms and rocks.

Meanwhile, in the two months since my boat was bedded on a trailer here in my neck of the woods, it has taken me nearly all of that time to “fine tune” my tarp system to keep the rain and snow from pooling on it. 

I worked and reworked and re-reworked the tarps to a skin-tight fit, only to come home a few hours later and find a lake had formed in the cockpit.

Then two weeks ago, after the last big rainfall when I came home after work to find the tarps drooping again like old eyelids, I lost my ever-so-cool “cool.” 

I morphed into a “Dr. Jekyll” version of “Yosemite Sam.”

It was a good job there was no one around to hear me shouting. I blamed every man who’d ever come through my life and not stayed. Everything I’d wanted to say to each of them spilled out of my mouth in any angry tangent as I tied those tarps down once and for all.

Funny enough, I did such a good job of it I won’t ever have to worry again about that boat for the rest of the winter.

Thank you kindly gentlemen.

For the love of dogs and teachers like you

No word of a lie, it was indeed an interesting week.

I am on a doggie hiatus, having been relieved of my duties by “Mr. P,” who returned from the North just in time to save me from “Little Miss Goes Berserk.” 

And as “Pepe” and “Bear” piled into my boyfriend’s truck and took up their travel positions, a part of me wished the dogs would stay another week, maybe two—but then I slapped myself across the face—twice—and repeated the words uttered by Cher in the 1987 movie “Moonstruck.”

“SNAP OUT OF IT!”

When the dogs left the yard for home, I rubbed my red and smarting cheek and then bolted inside and skidded across my kitchen floor, pumped one fist, and screeched at the top of my lungs,  “Freedom!” as I played air guitar.

I was Tom Cruise in the 1983 movie “Risky Business.”  

I danced the “Funky Chicken” by myself, jumped up and down all over my bed (and the one in the spare room,) line danced with a stuffed animal named “Joe”—the sacrificial monkey with a permanent smile—who survived a week of being thrashed around by “Pepe.” 

Then I cracked open a bottle of red wine and had two glasses before I realized it was only 2:30 in the afternoon.

What the heck. The sun was shining. I took the bottle outside and grabbed a lawn chair and piled into my solo Sunday afternoon like an audience of concert fans.

Surely, yes, there had been doggone good times. There also had been  dogged settings ripped from the 1837 children’s classic, “Goldilocks and the Three Bears.”

I’d come home to a house hurricane with bed sheets set to chaos. Cupboard doors (at dog level) were thrown open and—yes believe it or not—the “Quaker Oats” bag had been discovered, dismembered, and oatmeal had been strewn about in mouthfuls.

As I entered the storybook scene, I uttered the words of my childhood readings, “Someone has been eating my porridge!” and “Someone has been sleeping in my bed!”

“Pepe” and “Bear,” curled up quaintly on my expensive leather sofa, glanced up from their faked daylong housings, with shifty stares of innocence. Guilty as charged.

I’ve since foamed my peed-on carpet, pushed four loads of dog blanket laundry through my washing machine, and picked at least a wig’s worth of dog hair off my furniture.

Yet sadly there are no vociferous “woofs” and dog hugs that signal my furry friends’ excitement to my homecoming from work.

It is very quiet in here. The doggone dogs might I say, are missed.

And for you, Joyce Cunningham, one of the finest English teachers of my high school years, who passed away on November 7^th, 2015, far too soon for this town of your passion, and most certainly before you and I had had one last chat on the controversial subject of using a conjunction to begin a sentence, I end this story wishing you were still here.

But alas, we don’t always get what we wish for and yet no matter what, I will never forget you, the teacher who gave me wings.  

The dogs rule the roost

I’m babysitting my boyfriend’s two dogs this week while he is working in northern Manitoba. “The boys” and I are on a learning curve and I’m aghast to admit that I am the student and not the teacher—at least not yet. 

“Pepe” is a short off-white (needs a bath) wire-haired stubborn little mastermind who can hear a bread crumb drop to the floor in the kitchen but was rendered completely deaf when I released him to outside without a leash to pee, wherein he raced off chasing the illusive nothing and ignored my constant bellow of, “Come back here this instant!”

I walked a half-mile to find him rolling in deer droppings. 

“Bear,” is a lab-cross with bad eyesight who has the keenest snout I’ve ever seen, given that he can find the tiny morsel of cooked egg white left on the kitchen table—evident by the long lick of tongue residue I found beside my toast plate when I returned from a split second visit to the bathroom during breakfast.

Old cat “Millie,” perched on the windowsill that faces into the kitchen from the porch, had that flat stare look that said, “I told you so.”

During the first dog night in the house, I found the little one buried under the blankets on my side of the bed, splayed out in an unconscious stupor and chasing rabbits. I woke the little boss up and told it to move its carcass to the other side of the bed. Strangely, “Pepe” was deaf again.

By morning the two canines were wagging tails about the door, eager to get outside and do their “business” and I praised them for holding it through the night—until I stepped in a warm puddle of yellow liquid in my bare foot. Luckily I saw the pile of little brown cylinders on the floor before I stepped in those too.

“Millie” was still in the window, cat laughing.

A sermon ensued with said culprit dogs about the dog rules.

The canine capers sat motionless on their haunches, shifting eye contact with each other as I spelled it out and then told them if they didn’t behave I would put them out in the porch with the cats.

I looked back to see “Millie’s” jaw drop open against the window, struck stupid by the shear thought of canines setting foot in her sunning territory.

Next, our first morning walk—or rather a socket wrenching of my shoulder joints as I was dragged down the field by two dogs pretending to be Great Danes chasing a wild boar.

Using my Alpha voice I threatened to duct tape the mutts to the picnic table if they didn’t slow down. I fell on deaf ears of course, until I mentioned the word “treat” and “home” and “squirrel” in the same sentence.

I leave the dogs in the house when I go to work. “Sit, stay, and be good.”

I come home after eight hours to find the bed sheets in a big ball on the floor, and my favourite “off limits” lounge chair covered in lots of dog hair.

The dog rules. The dogs rule. The doggone rules.

The rulers lie at my feet, look up and slap their tails on the living room floor—Morse code for “I love you, my human.”

I smile. It’s going to be an interesting week.