The tears were streaming down my face when I finally banged the clamp off of the old battery. The boat wouldn’t start and the old battery had somehow overheated last summer and needed to be replaced. I had a feeling that the problem wasn’t the battery– I suspected it was the starter– but I wasn’t sure. And the one person that I always counted on to help me, was no longer here.
The kids looked at me in surprise. “What’s wrong, Mom?”
“I’m just thinking about Dad,” I explained. “Every time there was something wrong with the boat, he was the one to fix it or to tell me what was wrong with it. I’m just missing him.”
This week, there’s been one thing after another wrong with the boat. The battery clamp broke off and I had to run to town to buy a new one. The starter was indeed the problem, and I ended up writing a check to the mechanic for that one. “Oh by the way, Mom, the gas gauge doesn’t work,” David informed me just before pulling me for a run earlier in the week. I fixed that. “Mom, the water pump isn’t working and the boat has some water in it,” he told me tonight after another barefoot run. Joe fixed the broken wire and got the pump running again.
Lately, I’ve been missing Dad a lot. The house seems empty without him. If you recall my earlier post about seeing a red-winged blackbird, then you know the story of that connection with my Dad. Last week Friday, I was doing a clinic up at the Blue Moo Lake and I was feeling a little bit anxious about being able to put together a trick run. I had struggled on the water earlier in the week at Cedar Lake and had not yet even practiced a trick run. I was floating in the water, waiting for the boat to return and a lone bird landed on the bank. I turned to take a closer look and saw that it was a…
Red-winged blackbird.
I threw my head back and laughed.