Happy 91st birthday to Chief! If he was here with us I’d be frying up oysters for supper and icing a chocolate cake. There would be a birthday basket full of onion bulbs, seed potatoes, and other gardening gifts resting by his place at the dining table. “Let us never know what old age is. Let us know the happiness time brings, not count the years,” Decius Magnus Ausonius.

Sat out on the porch with oldest brother midmorning shivering in the cool breezes. Old Man Winter called Mr. Old North Wind and they lowered the temperatures and cooled off the spring breezes. The sky has been beautifully overcast in Father Sky’s cigar smoke grays and coconut whites with an occasional pocket of mermaid aqua peeking through when the clouds briefly bounce apart. My pansies’ blooms are loving the cool day, standing tall on their slender green stems, their purple and lilac blossom heads upturned to the sky, giving thanks for the cool day. They haven’t enjoyed the summer warmth of the recent spring days, hanging their heads down in the afternoon heat, but they are beautiful today.

Yesterday in the warmth of the spring sunshine I put my legs up in the porch swing and pretended I was floating down a slowly moving river resting in a beautiful handcrafted canoe of western red cedar built by my dearest friend’s husband. The canoe was embellished with mahogany hummingbirds, carved with their wings outstretched in flight, flying through slender honeysuckle vines etched all around the hull. The banks of the mossy brown river were covered in gloriously green rhododendrons blooming blossoms in pinks and purples, limbs so heavy with colorful blooms they bent down and touched the water. A great blue heron stopped fishing to stand at attention as the canoe slowly passed. As I got drowsy from the sun’s sandman, I closed my eyes and my hand trailed along in the cool water of the porch river as I slowly relaxed. Suddenly a freight train horn blasted me awake and up out of the canoe. Guess the horn ran the heron off the river bank, too. I could hear his powerful wing beats as he gracefully flew away, his head tucked against his shoulders, his legs trailing straight behind. My imagination went with the heron as reality woke me up. One day I’m going to really go to sleep and fall out of the porch swing.

Katherine Hepburn writes, “As one goes through life, one learns if you don’t paddle your own canoe, you don’t move.” Faith is like a canoe trip requiring our paddling through uncertain conditions, trusting God to guide us through the rivers and rapids of life. We have to put forth effort to move forward in our faith knowing we’ll have challenging whitewater moments along with calm water travels. God wants us to take a personal responsibility to move forward in our faith, navigating uncertainty through prayer and Bible study.

“We’re not all in the same boat. We’re all in the same storm. Some have yachts, some have canoes, and some are drowning. Just be kind and help whoever you can,” Damian Barr. The world really is in a storm now. We can’t get along. We don’t know who we are or what we are. We all need to “paddle through life’s journey with faith and divine guidance,” Babatunde Disu Snr.

The yachts exist in their shallow waters trying to navigate the world, trying to control things with their purse strings. The canoes are battling the rapids hoping for calm water to eventually even out and slow down their world’s travels. Some are drowning in a sea of homelessness and poverty. We feed the poor of the world yet let our homeless and starving children have hopes of a shelter’s cot and one hot meal. We’ve lost the art of arguing and agreeing with our disagreements. Compromise is not longer an option. We can’t win every argument and everyone doesn’t deserve a trophy. Some of us paddle our canoe with one oar but are thankful for that one oar. That’s me!

“Each person must make their own journey. It is like every human is given a life canoe. The canoe has one seat and one paddle.” — PaddlePortageCanoes