Sailing and Bailing

 

Messing around in boats

Seems like this summer that means bailing rather than sailing, three little boats awash with rain water needing emptying over and over, a repetitive domestic chore like folding laundry or emptying the dishwasher.  Decades ago I delegated bailing boats to my three kids; decades later to my two resident grandsons.  Bribes in those days were easy, homemade cookies warm from the oven or maybe a trip to Moomers for the ice cream President Biden enjoyed on his visit last week.

I used to dislike bailing.  I also disliked emptying dishwashers.  I was happy to fill the dishwasher as a way of cleaning up the kitchen surfaces, but I always got the children or someone else to do the emptying, just as I got children to bail the boats.

Oddly, now, I enjoy sitting in the dinghy or in one or the other of the two sunfish and dipping the bucket over and over into the accumulated rain and emptying it into the lake.  Much of my life in retirement now consists of ordinary repetitive domestic chores that I used to relegate to other people or, if unable to avoid them, to cram them into the early hour of the morning before heading to work. Laundry, dishes, meal prepping, groceries, dry-cleaners, post office, any and all of these could be dealt with quickly and before the “real” day of work began.   No longer.  When I contemplate at day’s end what I’ve done throughout my waking hours much/most of it consists of those simple and curiously satisfying tasks. 

To be honest, however, all of these tasks combined still occupy less time than I spend reading or frittering away at the computer with email and facebook.  It’s summer and I’m in my cottage by the lake so by choice there is no newspaper except the local one with its very limited news and no TV. That allows a lot more time for reading and also for just sitting by the beach looking at the lake, watching mama duck with her babies,

watching and listening for loons, seeing the occasional boat pass, fast ones pulling tubers or skiers and the stately pontoons with their sedentary passengers surveying in their turn this peaceful lake scene that their presence disturbs.  I am happy when they hand in their rental boat and go home. 

It’s a red-letter day when the baking urge takes over, often for no good reason, no guests anticipated that day or the next, just that urge to get your hands into dough and the dough—whatever kind—into the oven, and to fill the house with that best of all perfumes, bread or pies or cookies baking and later filling the refrigerator or even the freezer until family or friends come to share in the ultimate pleasure of consuming them.  The two grandsons who used to summer with me for a decade or more know all my hiding places because I never set out all the cookies at once, a batch going directly into the easily accessible cookie jar,

but others disappearing into a variety of containers that no one except those boys and their mom would discover.  And also, of course, into the freezer.

This year my constant companion while the two-footed friends and family come and go is Brioche, my shadow by day and by night, my companion on land and at sea, already at ease in the dinghy and the canoe although not yet the sunfish, mostly because I also haven’t taken out the sunfish yet or even sat in it except to bail it yet once more. She sleeps contentedly while I read or sit at the computer but leaps up the moment I stand up, her clear and constant message, “Don’t leave me.  Whatever you are doing, take me with you.” And I do.