Harbors…

‘A ship in a harbor is safe, but that is not what ships are made for.’ John Shedd

The Universe gifted my hubby @rosko2112 and I with a true ‘full circle’ experience for Father’s Day- one that left us with sweet smiles and full hearts.

The simple backstory to it is this: My husband loves boats, and when I met him, he was a full-fledged bachelor whose most prized possession was what we affectionately called THE BOAT (a 31-foot-long Sailboat that was his idea of a committed relationship.)

THE BOAT was a very romantic part of our courtship… and a part of our world we had every intention of maintaining.

But of course, life had different plans. After we married and welcomed our first child together- and said first child proved himself to be a whirling dervish of activity 24/7 … it became apparent to both of us that any notion we had of spending sunny days sailing with our cherubic child were totally out of the question. This child was no more likely to spend a day sailing with his parents than he was, to say…raise a herd of goats while residing in an Alpine village.

So… THE BOAT was sold to the highest bidder and our world filled up with the busy-ness of family life which at the time included not just said rambunctious little person (@a_roskoski) but two busy teenage children (@suttc013  and @thestyledseed) as well.

Days turned into months, and months into years, and now more than a dozen trips around the sun later… those teenagers are adults navigating their own lives, and that whirling dervish of a child named Ajay…is still spinning and weaving his way through the world 24/7… (and dragging us (happily) along right behind him.)

Every once in a while, we reminisce – and we laugh at the thought that if we had kept THE BOAT, it quite literally would have been used zero times in the twelve years that have elapsed…. but even though THE BOAT and adulting proved to be a mutually exclusive predicament for us, this does not change the fact that @rosko2112 loves boats.

With this in mind I headed into Father’s Day with a plan this year. You see, the Hubs is an extraordinary father to all three of our children, and Momma Bear was of the mind that, dammit, if @rosko2112 cannot quite have a boat proper in his life, well he should at least have a beautiful photograph of one.

I went to work soliciting the Google Gods and began the hunt for photos of sailboats on the Hubs favorite lake (Tahoe.) I was surprised to discover that although there were oodles of websites and photographers who dedicate the whole of their work to photography of Lake Tahoe, there was only one solitary picture I could find (out of hundreds) that contained a sailboat. Luckily even though the thumbnail image in the on-line store was small, I could tell it was perfect- and I ordered it on the spot.

When it arrived, and I peeled back the brown wrapping that covered it, I was stunned to see the image in its full 24 x 36-inch glory. Stunned because it was pretty? Sure, it was pretty alright- but what had left me rocked back on my heels as I stared at the photo was the fact that the boat in the picture was THE BOAT. That’s right, the boat picture I had purchased, was THE BOAT- the one that had sailed out of our lives 12 years prior. Had I tried to accomplish this feat, I know I could never have succeeded- but by letting the winds of fate chart the course, a pretty miraculous little voyage had just come full circle. Grace is like that. Wow.

Looking at the photo I was moved with the thought that had we held onto ‘THE BOAT’ all these years- it would have been idle and unused in a harbor…. And as today’s quote so elegantly states, a ship in a harbor is safe, but that’s not what ships are made for.

Someday our boating life will return- but for the foreseeable future I know we will happily navigate the all hands-on deck family life that the Universe has given us… because sailing is nice- but that is not what our family was built for.

Happy belated Father’s Day @rosko2112