“The little lady who lived in a shoe”.
 
I met her this week.  A delightful woman of middle age, I think.  She really does not have any children but there is one cat. 
 
Chips-Ahoy be his name.  Not so odd considering he is a chocolate colored Siamese cat and lives on what some refer to as a yellow submarine. 
 
Oh, it is not really a submarine, but it is yellow all right and leaked quickly enough at one time that it could have been a submarine if madam went to shore for too very long.  But then most wood boats leak especially fifty year old boats not loved much in their youth.  I think the lady may have not had enough love also.  She makes up for it now, the love.  She lavishes it on the cat and boat effectively, sparingly, but effectively, so as not to wear out herself or the objects of her affection.  That’s how it works on a boat you know; even a fifty year old boat such as this one from Hong Kong.  How it got to South Africa might be a good story for sure and how she took it to South America is one I must hear again one day—if I ever see her and Chips-Ahoy.  Funny how she told us her name and the cat’s but I only remember the cat’s name.  Odd, isn’t it?
 
Thin as a rail is she, both the woman and the yellow boat with a cute little dinghy that seems to love bobbing along behind mother and her ship.  One is tempted here to end the last sentence with “…ship of fools….” as some of you might think of her and her cat.  But living one’s dream, is that foolish, no matter the risk?
 
The facts are as thin as the lady, I must admit, but yet, we stay true to the facts within which we may surmise perhaps a little more.  But reading between the lines of people’s minds is what I do best if not always perfectly, at least enough not to be challenged, often, except by scallywags and those muggily-like bumpkins who play skeptic to all man’s words.
 
The lady, and she is every bit the lady,  this lady of South Africa, which if one conjures up royalty living on a sixpence a month off the hardpan scrabble of the Texas hill country raising, tending and eating one’s own grown provisions, this woman is the quiet missionary tending her flock of dreams.  She is soft to speak to, vulnerable to look at, gracious to speak with.  Despite her poor hearing, she is so very, very quiet.  One doesn’t see the strength in her initially, you have to go looking for it and even then it’s difficult to recognize.  But it is there, in her soothing British tinged South African understated accented speech.  The strength is there.
 
Fourteen years ago she was with a man.  She bought a boat.  He, she found out, was one of those in love with the idea and the messing about, not in boats, but working on them.  She abided and forewent ten years of her dream.  Waking one day from the ten year slumber she realized perhaps this was not the right setting to continue sleeping away her dreams.  She left.
 
She bought this boat, a boat more fitting of the butcher, the baker and the candlestick maker—a leaky tub.  But never mind that.  One must dream their life and then live their dream.  So she set to sea, alone, so very alone, from South Africa for the vision of the Caribbean set so deeply inside of her by the smell of the sea and the pent-up demand for it to finally happen.
 
She pumped the bilges manually once or twice a day to keep the water where it belonged, around the boat, not in it.   Once into her adventure a wind of the roaring forties came at her biting, heaving, tossing, a demanding threat strongly from the east for three days.  No doubt the stiff upper lip tighten, grimaced  a bit, perhaps even quivered, as she realized in the 20-30’ seas that there was nothing for it but to go on.  She could not turn back into the eye of the storm as the boat, being a sailboat, can go nicely off the wind but not nearly into it.  Once over, as with all sailors, the memory shortens and lives in the cruisers mist that I have so aptly discovered and named. Pithy, eh what?
 
She visited Brazil, Venezuela, the string of islands, pearls of the Caribbean where she discovered the inexpensive joys of fiberglass and epoxy resin that now sheaths the no longer leaking hull of her wooden boat.  Onward to Bermuda and then, recently, after four years of cruising, flew the “Q” flag in Newport Harbor, announcing her desire to engage America as a visitor from sea and a foreign land.
 
The thin lady on the thin boat with the fat cat and the happy dinghy with kerosene lamps, no refrigerator, a larder full of tinned food stuffs, homemade tarpaulin sails on a junk rigged mast with only five liters of engine fuel are gone now.  Perhaps they have slipped by us in the heavy mist and fog to explore Maine and Nova Scotia after imbibing the legacy of Newport.  Clothed in dawn’s early light she may be ghosting along toward the Chesapeake, a place of mystery to her, as much as she is a mystery to Capt’n Lynnie.
 
I do not know the specifics of the fears, the joys, the restless energies that drive her.  I only know they are there.  I can feel them in her aura.  I can taste them in her ship’s scent.  I can sense them on the wind.    
 
Oh my, how I feel these things.  They are the things behind my very own eyes, those nuggets of thought that push and pull and carry me curiously from there to here and here to there like the careless flutter of a thoughtless leaf on a thoughtless breeze yet all part of Nature’s grand design.
 
How do we fit in?
 
Damn if I know. I heard this recently: “Life may not be the party we hoped for, but while we are here we might as well dance”.
 
Capt’n Lynnie, would you save the last dance for me?
 

Capt'n Lynnie and Skinwalker