We've Been Hit!
We left our little vacation week for 26 short hours and came back to find our little rowboat gone. "Stolen!" we automatically thought. When we were in our 20s our car got stolen four times. Then ten years later, our whole house got stolen practically, all those wedding gifts my God what a mess. So we just assumed the boat got boosted – until our nice neighbor told us there’d been a sudden microburst kind of a thing the night we were gone with winds clocked at 70 mph just down the road. More likely those winds just picked her our little boat and headed across the cove with her. Also, no offense, she all but said, but who'd take her?It’s true. She’s just a little cork of a thing made of recycled Pepsi cans or whatever they use these days, a thing so light oars hardly work which is why she also has a little trolling engine: to give her some heft. This nice neighbor even toured the cove herself on her jet-ski, to see if she was caught in the underbrush somewhere out there. We went out ourselves in a canoe a few hours later. I was l but calling her name ‘til I remembered I had never thought to name her. What kind of boat people would we ever be? And would I do without her and her sweet little motor like a dragonfly perched on the back?Then, just when we got back from our search, here was word from Marine Patrol. A nice neighbor on the other side of the cove saw the little thing bumping against the boat-ramp on the beach near his house. He pulled it to his own place, garaged the motor and the next morning when we went over to meet him, offered to run it back to our place on his truck.We didn’t need that though. Old Dave and I we just lifted her onto the top of my trusty little car and drove her home, leaving me to say two things here:
- God bless good all neighbors, and
- It's Mother Nature who's the most light-fingered one of all, known to toss bigger crafts than ours around, that's for sure.
