The little girl sits on a dusty wooden workbench. There is no breeze in the barn, but even despite the scorching Texas summer weather, she doesn't mind. She brushes away a mosquito and kicks her knobby-kneed legs in the air beneath the bench in rhythm.
"Daddy, why'd you decide to build this boat?" Her father, lightly coated with sawdust from the circular saw he used earlier and dripping sweat, stops measuring and looks up. He is standing in the middle of a small, nearly-finished hull of what will someday be a two-or-three-man sailboat. Its lines are unfinished but artfully crafted. He sits on the edge and pats the space next to him - the blonde child climbs up beside him.
He tells her that when he was her age (quite small), his daddy helped him make a toy sailboat to play with during the hot, hot summers. How he spent hours cruising the nefarious "seas" with the Lady McQuay, named after the brand on the wax paper sail it bore (the packaging to the most reliable piston rings on the market, according to his daddy). The memory of working with his father to build the tiny boat stuck with him his whole life - and when he was "all growed up," he decided to make a life-size one himself.
The little girl thinks for a minute. She looks outside the barn door and sees the big treehouse her daddy built in the tree outside the summer before, next to the swing he hung from impossibly high branches the year before. She glances over at the raised flowerbed they built a few months ago, when he let her pick out the flowers to plant all by herself. She feels her eyes fill with tears a little, but she is just a little too young to really understand why.
She hugs her father tightly, pats the boat reverently. "It's a very pretty boat, daddy. I wish I could have seen the first one."
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3 comments:
I was hoping to get from Point A to Point B swiftly. I wanted to smoothly sail under your radar - I am nothing, I would not offend. You noticed; you summoned all of your darkest power and hovered. Scared the breath out of me, but I was already too far gone to turn back. Looming above, you cracked and moaned. I shriveled and did the only thing I could - I lay on my back, and admired the huge of you.
The energy of the day may have waned, but the power of the quiet overwhelmed her in that moment. Alone in the stillness, she found her senses quickened to respond to what was all around her. She would return to the reality of her routine in her own time. The shore would be there when she felt the need to return. She now understood the cradling sway of the ocean. Broken and temporarily lost, her soul would bring her back to sail these waters again.
The little girl sits on a dusty wooden workbench. There is no breeze in the barn, but even despite the scorching Texas summer weather, she doesn't mind. She brushes away a mosquito and kicks her knobby-kneed legs in the air beneath the bench in rhythm.
"Daddy, why'd you decide to build this boat?" Her father, lightly coated with sawdust from the circular saw he used earlier and dripping sweat, stops measuring and looks up. He is standing in the middle of a small, nearly-finished hull of what will someday be a two-or-three-man sailboat. Its lines are unfinished but artfully crafted. He sits on the edge and pats the space next to him - the blonde child climbs up beside him.
He tells her that when he was her age (quite small), his daddy helped him make a toy sailboat to play with during the hot, hot summers. How he spent hours cruising the nefarious "seas" with the Lady McQuay, named after the brand on the wax paper sail it bore (the packaging to the most reliable piston rings on the market, according to his daddy). The memory of working with his father to build the tiny boat stuck with him his whole life - and when he was "all growed up," he decided to make a life-size one himself.
The little girl thinks for a minute. She looks outside the barn door and sees the big treehouse her daddy built in the tree outside the summer before, next to the swing he hung from impossibly high branches the year before. She glances over at the raised flowerbed they built a few months ago, when he let her pick out the flowers to plant all by herself. She feels her eyes fill with tears a little, but she is just a little too young to really understand why.
She hugs her father tightly, pats the boat reverently. "It's a very pretty boat, daddy. I wish I could have seen the first one."
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