Boys' Sailing

My twins at one of their sailing classes.

I originally wrote this 24 September, 2004…
The twins are taking a sailing class at one of our local state parks. I invited my Momma to go with me to watch them. The weather was in the mid-80’s but the breezes off the Bay held a touch of autumn.

We packed a picnic, laid a blanket under a tree by the water’s edge, and watched each of the twenty students outfit and rig their small sailboats and then wheel them down to the water. At first it looked like sailboat bumper cars and then they started capsizing, falling over one-by-one, like dominoes. The girls screamed and the boys yelled triumphantly. The water was very cold. *smile*

Then, magically, they all lined up perfectly and sailed out to the buoy marker and made perfect turns, one after the other. Beautiful and so very peaceful to watch. Even Quinn watched the sailboat ballet though he did have more fun playing in and eating the sand, and seeing how far he could wander away before I ran after him, scooping him up to bring him back to the blanket.

A perfect way to spend the first day of autumn.

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And all night long they sailed away;
And when the sun went down
They whistled and warbled a moony song
To the echoing sound of a coppery gong,
In the shade of the mountains brown.
“O Timballoo! How happy we are,
When we live in a sieve and a crockery-jar,
And all night long in the moonlight pale,
We sail away with a pea-green sail,
In the shade of the mountains brown!”
Far and few, far and few,
Are the lands where the Jumblies live;
Their heads are green, and their hands are blue,
And they went to sea in a Sieve.
~From “The Jumblies” by Edward Lear~
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Thank you so very much for all of your prayers! My Momma is doing well…