for Mom
She sailed because she loved him...my father. And when I asked her in those remaining days, "if you could go do anything, what would you like to do?" And her reply, "go sailing".
Sailing was not a sport in our family, it was not even a hobby or pastime....it was a 'way of life'. Mom brought me aboard in those early years and laid me up in the v~berth. I have vivid memories of listening to those wooden ribs and planks breathing in a rhythmic pattern with the lift and fall of each wave she'd pull through. What a nurse-maid I had, the rolling and pitching of a wooden vessel~

As I grew, so did my adventurous spirit, and Mom was there to swim and dive with me wherever we weighed anchor. She and I would set off on foot to find the nearest town to gather supplies and of course somehow always find an ice cream parlor...her favorite! On one island in Canada, we came upon a little shop that had all forms of British/Scottish/Irish memorabilia and she ordered the 'Wallace' tartan fabric so she could make all of us 5 kids something for Christmas that year! You see she was always making something. Every boat was sewn together with Mom's love....every cushion, sail cover, sailboat cross-stitch, wheel cover, bimini, port-hole curtains and numerous other decorative & practical item.
But Mom was the self-proclaimed 'chief, cook & bottle-washer'....for down in the hold, organizing all the ships stores was her proclivity....we always laughed at how every floor board, closet and cubby was filled with canned meat (she canned herself in winter), vegetables, Heritage House soda, sweet-snacks and hard tack saltines! On cold dreary evenings when it seemed the whole world was wet and cold, she could pull something out of the stores and before long, the whole cabin was wafting with hearty smells and warming our bellies. Mom was good about things like that...always making you feel better and always encouraging you to get out there and challenge yourself.
It must have worked, because as I became a teenager and my siblings had all gone off and I remained behind, there were many times when the weather conditions even scared Mom. She would go down below to keep everything in place and Dad and I would face the storms together, he at the helm, and I pulling in the sails and lashing down loose ends. These were the days I remember most when I think about how much I loved my parents and how much courage they instilled in me.
Besides all the constant fixing and rehab on a boat, there was always plenty of water folly.....dragging our bodies on the leeward side as we sailed along, playing in the dinghy behind, swinging off the deck from the halyards and my personal favorite: being thrown overboard right before we crossed international waters so they could cheer that I had swam from the U.S. to Canada! ha ha You see, Mom was a water safety instructor and was ever vigilant about our swimming and diving skills....I had to have been the youngest child I knew that had full mask & fins gear. Mom would watch over me from onboard, as I would dive under the boat and to the bottom pretending to be Jacques Cousteau...my hero.
I can hardly remember a time when Mom wasn't busy doing something, fixing something, putting something away or trying to find something in the bilge. I remember she found out that you can't put cans of vegetables in the bilge because the paper labels will fall off. We had lots of succotash that summer, 'cause she never knew what was in the cans until they were opened....she called it dinner a la carte.
But at night, under the caboose lantern light in the cabin, she would insist we play a round of "oh Hell", her favorite family card game. I can still hear her say "Hell's Bells" whenever she didn't make her call. Once in a blue moon, I would catch her reading a book and falling asleep, until I noticed her little secret......as the book fell down on her lap, I would notice she had cut a square hole out of the center of the book and I had discovered her buried treasure hiding place!! har har
One of my funniest memories of Mom was when we were docking at South Bass Island and she had one foot on the dock and one on the boat with the bow line in her hand....as the boat started drifting away from the dock, she looked at me with a glint in her eye and she declared, "I'm going in aren't I?" And sure enough, she splashed into the space between the boat and the dock. She came up cool and refreshed sputtering water, "ah, that felt good".
I loved my Mom that much more when we were at sea. It always seemed we had left all our troubles far away....and this was family time~and that made Mom happy!

thanks Mom for making all those memories~
love, suzi

*my Mom passed this summer on June 15th and her spirit rose into the wind~