I married a great man. Seriously. I doubt you could find around these parts a man who is half as good as he is. To you, my loyal listener, I cannot lie. When he informed me one night he wanted to build a boat. . .well, I thought he was just plain crazy. Now, I understand how men like to have their toys. When he just had to have the latest in farm equipment, I didn’t say anything. I kept my mouth shut, too, when he spent all that money on new tools. Honestly, how many hammers can one man need? My mouth, however, did not stay closed the night he mentioned the boat. Why, there isn’t any body of water anywhere near here. I told him just as much.
“I am getting a boat,” he said, matter-of-factly.
“A boat?!” I shrieked. “Why? Where is the nearest lake?” About that time, a very bad thought ran through my mind: things just can’t get any worse. I have to stop thinking things like that, because no sooner did I think it, than he looked like he wanted to say something else.
“Not only that, but I’m building it myself,” he told me.
“Well, at least that explains all those new tools you just bought,” I muttered.
“Trust me,” he said simply.
Trust me. The words are still echoing in my head. How can I not trust him? This is the man I promised I would spend the rest of my life. We have raised children – three boys – together. Now they are grown and married. I trusted him all these years. Why was I having such trouble doing it now?
I trust you women out there will understand exactly where I’m coming from. When I was a young girl standing beside my mother in the kitchen, I did not start learning to cook by preparing a seven course meal. I started much, much smaller. You would think, therefore, that my husband started his boat-building hobby by building a small boat. You would be wrong. This was no small boat. It wasn’t even a medium-sized boat. When I saw the plans, my jaw dropped. This boat would take him forever to build!
“Here are the plans,” he said as he unrolled them.
“This is a boat?” I questioned. “This is beyond huge. You have to be kidding me. You’re going to build this by yourself?”
“Yes.”
“What are you planning to do with this boat?” I inquired.
“Trust me.”
It took him an awfully long time to build that boat. There would be nights when he was laboring long past the going down of the sun. You would think a project of this magnitude would make a man devote every waking hour to see its completion. Again, you would be wrong. Not once during the construction did I feel neglected. He treated me wonderfully. Of course, I did my part, too. I took him water, made sure he ate, and even handed him tools from time to time.
It wasn’t very long before the neighbors started noticing. Boy, did they have some questions. My husband never bragged about his project. He answered their questions sincerely, patiently. It was as if he had anticipated them all along. Eventually the stares and the laughter died down, and life was back to normal.
What happened after he finished that boat, though, was far from normal. If you had told me at the very beginning what was to come, I don’t know that I would have believed you. I hardly believed it myself as it was happening. There were times when I thought it was all a dream.
That boat held not only my husband and me, but also my sons, their wives, and a countless host of animals. It saved us from something we had never seen before, something our neighbors couldn’t comprehend. We had never seen rain before, so you can imagine our excitement that day it started raining.
Why it was that a boat saved us from the flood, I’ll never know. However, I have learned something as a result. There will always be things we are not meant to understand, like why the snakes had to come along for the ride. Our place is not to question these things. Trust me.
Copyright, 1998 - 2005. All Rights Reserved.
http://www.angelfire.com/al3/thecabin
The groovy border, button, and bar are courtesy Windy's Web Designs.
The great cabin graphic is courtesy Microsoft's Design Gallery Live.
