the boat: an apology

I wanted to clear my conscience and get a few things off my chest. More than anything, I wanted to take this moment to apologize to my husband for my lack of faith in his most current effort to live deliberately: the boat. Or, to be more precise, the boat-refurbishing project.

I apologize for calling it a horrible rat-infested (or to be precise) rat-urine soaked waste of time. I acknowledge that buying things off Craigslist on a whim, driving miles out the way to pick them up, and paying (admittedly very small) sums for what you could conceivably be PAID FOR hauling away are all part of the innocent past-time that I have come to know, if not fully appreciate, as you do.

When you got calls from random old geezers with this same strange (to me) obsession, giving you advice about how to salvage the boat with the GIGANTIC hole in the bow by stripping off its outer covering, replacing several wooden parts with ones newly crafted by you in our basement, and covering the whole by a process that somehow involves a stapler, I apologize for vowing to myself that you would take my children on the open water in this contraption over my dead body.

I apologize for continually complaining about once having to help you unload the boat (or shall we say the once and future boat?) from the car by placing my half on my head. I also apologize for continuing to freak out when you told me that this object, which I had already placed on my head, had housed two rat nests in it, you discovered.

I apologize for complaining about the unbelievably loud noises coming from the basement in the night, as our children slept fitfully, suffering from teething pains and requiring frequent rocking and soothing. A bandsaw is, apparently, a useful and necessary device, and I should not have condemned it as universally as I did. I also apologize for my reluctance in holding various wooden things while you ran them through the machine, making some sort of part in fulfillment of the old geezer's advice.

Most of all, I apologize for not understanding that you need a hobby, and that it doesn't matter if it ever pans out or not, and I will stop professing to believe that it won't. So there.