Canoe, fathers.

(In keeping with the theme ....)

Just before the beginning of the summer during which I would turn sixteen, my dad asked me if I wanted to go on a canoeing trip with him. Except he didn't really ask. He'd already bought a canoe and made the reservations.

Being fifteen and eleven-twelfths, I most firmly did not want to go on a canoeing trip with him, especially one that involved a few days of roadtripping in our non-air-conditioned, AM-radio-only minivan followed by a week of paddling around and camping along a circuit of rivers and inter-connected lakes. But as much as I didn't want to go, neither did I have the heart to tell him no.

So I went and, as these things often turn out, it was one of the very best trips of my life – to that day and to this day still.

After its week of blazing glory, the canoe was hardly ever used again. It got tucked away behind my dad's house, resting against the wall, gathering moss and taking up space and valiantly safeguarding our memories. Until last month. Trying to lighten the burden of what gets carried unneccesarily through life, my dad sold it. He emailed me the advertisement that he'd posted and a couple of accompanying photos. Every time I've opened a message from him since, those same two photos pop up in the recent activity sidebar and bring an ache of nostalgia and yearning to my heart.

What I just wrote – that it is the canoe safeguarding the memories – is not true. They exist without it. They are ours for as long as our minds can hold them. But even knowing that, what a sense of loss we both had to see disappear from our lives the vessel that carried us through those precious moments together.

May it one day do the same for another daughter and the father she loves so much.

I am thinking of him today, and I am thinking of all of you, those of you whose husbands are already fathers as well as those of you whose husbands are waiting to be born as such.