Yesterday kind of felt like this:
Only with a canoe on top of the van, because it was one of the things in my mother's garage. So maybe our next trip will feel more like this:
Meanwhile, Lent begins this week, and I haven't really thought yet what discipline I might take on. I like that this girl gave up makeup, but I would have to start wearing makeup, which might . . . be . . . you know . . . sort of a discipline in itself. I guess. A hair shirt for the face. And everyone would think I was doing it to be vain, and so I'd have to not correct them, which would be a hair shirt for the soul, except that I really don't think I can face it. So to speak.
I don't think I'll write sonnets this year. If you miss the Lenten sonnets, many of last year's ended up in the book, so you can revisit that discipline if you like.
But truly, I think I'm thinking of a Lenten discipline as a blog spectacle, and that's all wrong. So maybe my discipline should be to do something private and secret, and to look on the surface of things as though I did not have a discipline at all, and to let people think I'm a slacker. Which, of course, I am in many ways. Oh shoe, how you do fit.
Meanwhile, since the austerities will be closing in . . .
3 comments:
You're very close to some of the best white water in the country at Ocoee. Don't know if I'd take a canoe for that, yet if you are very brave... After catching a fish accidentally at the little lake up the road from us a week ago, I took one of our kayaks out with a full tackle box and malice aforethought last Sunday afternoon. Caught another on the third cast, and upon that slim encouragement, spent the next three hours thrashing away at the water. The boy abandoned me after two hours and my twentieth repetition of the mantra "one more cast..." When we were called home for dinner he had to help extricate me from the vessel, a process that took about twenty minutes, and involved considerable groaning and gnashing of teeth.
Oh, believe me, don't I know. NC is full of good rivers, large and small. My brother has taken the 15-year-old out on the Yadkin and maybe also the French Broad . . . he grew up going to Camp Carolina in Brevard and was their head of canoeing for some years, so what he doesn't know from NC rivers isn't worth knowing. I need to pick his brain about places to go. But for now I'm thinking we take short people to Lake Norman to learn the rudiments . . . once the weather warms up just a bit. I don't think I'll ever be hard-core enough to be a winter paddler.
Winter paddling is tamer here. Most days now we are well into spring, with occasional blasts of what elsewhere might be mistaken for summer heat. We are not fooled. Summer is a-coming, and when it comes, we'll go no more a-paddling until fall returns sometime in November.
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