Declining to listen to reason

I’ll miss them.

They’ve been kind of like buddies.

Particularly on spring days with a hard southerly blow when I could stand in the shed door and watch them swing like wild drunk giants dancing home from the pub.

Charming as they are, the problem with intoxicated giants is that they tend to fall down.

That’s been happening lately.

And I want to build another boat.

So the black spruce are coming down.

As I look around at my life a year after a separation, the peculiar thing I’ve found is that things are kind of ticking along just fine.

The boys are good.

Their mom and I are friends now.

I’m still employed and I have a few hours of free time each week.

And now beyond tending to the responsibilities of adult life, it’s up to me chart my own course again.

Building a boat seems like a perfectly unreasonable thing to do with my new found agency.

Worse than that, I’m already dragging a community along with me.

As with the previous three,  I’m going to require a lot of favors to pull it off.

Dave and Jamie hauled the spruce out with their trucks.

Gerard doesn’t know it yet, but he’s going to be asked to load the logs onto his farm trailer with the tractor.

Addie might be asked to part with a black locust for a keel.

If anyone reading this has some decent looking Hakmatak (juniper to the Newfounlanders) growing on their property I could get for steamed timbers, consider this a proposition.

And Archie MacKenzie has offered to mill it all.

The funny thing about boats is that everybody just wants to help.

Nobody cares what you’re going to do with it.

And neither do I.

We gave The Spiteful Lady to an old timer in Bayfield and I haven’t bothered to put The Johanna Mary in the water for three years.

As soon as a boat leaves the shop it stops being a series of curves your mind is striving to create even as it can’t quite wrap itself around, and becomes something else to worry about.

Like a very expensive and needy cat.

So it’s best to take forever building them.

And to have people stop by and dream with you and offer advice they know you’re not going to heed.