When our friends moved back to town from Virginia, they asked if we could keep their boats in our back yard.

As usual, I was apprehensive at first. I didn’t want my children to tear them up. But they were a sturdy canoe and kayak. There was nothing the kids could do to them. The next thing we asked was if we could go boating with them. They moved here in June. The whole summer stretched out in front of us.

And then it passed. And we never went out on those boats.

My daughter got to play with canoes today with her swim classes. She said how heavy the boat was and how she couldn’t push it very hard very fast. She cracked up her students when she tried.

I remember how canoeing was the easiest level of boating we could try at Girl Scout Camp. I always wondered about that, considering how easy it is to tip one of those things, and how hard it is to steer them. But they told me that the sailboat was the hardest, and durned if I’ve ever been in a sailboat!

Or a kayak, for that matter. Some of the children kayaked one Labor Day weekend when we’d been invited out to a friend’s lake house. I had a new baby and wasn’t prepared to do anything like that at the time. It looked like fun, though. I wonder how often we’ll take our friends up on their offer to canoe and kayak next summer?