The Anecdotal Life Part. 26

I weighed in at 141 pounds today. If you'd like to lose weight easily; just let me know since I've lost my six and half pounds by scrubbing and cleaning my 34 ft. boat. (It has to be done on my boat, of course.) I seem to have gotten an uninvited company of "hanger-oners"(Can't figure out how one would spell that.) Namely, barnacles and zebra mussels up my pipes and over my bottom....as it were. Furthermore, the marina hadn't got around to fixing it yet. I went up to see about their progress on Tuesday and " nothing doing" as my dad would say. So I had no intention of wasting the gas it took me to get there and washed and washed and washed the boat. I was a wreck when I finished. But not my boat. It looked sooo fine! My new hand took all the work fairly well. Just pretty stiff and sore come morning.
But in this process I became reunited with my boat. I was fearful I would be swamped by old memories and had been avoiding staying over. I was mournful for about an hour , then OVER THAT!! I began to feel the serenity close in as the quiet tones of the water lapping against the hull seemed to be talking to me, telling me to relax, and be where I was, not in the past. And where I was, was grand. No one was around, the water was still, an orange colored, half-moon was coming up, and as I went out to clean off one last spot, I chanced upon a baby purple martin clinging to one of the lines. He had no other choice. He didn't have the feathers he needed to fly and somehow he had gotten that far. His parents were frantic. I figured to heck with it; it could be his boat too, and I tiptoed slowly backwards.
In the morning it was gorgeous. A blue heron was just fifteen feet from me, peering out from behind a piling as if to say, " Whatever are you doing here on a Wednesday! Nobody comes here on Wednesdays!" Except me. I loved it.
Copyright: August 15, 2006.